+1. This is exactly why I switched too. I will say that there are things you can do in Finale (and SCORE for that matter) that you still can’t do in D5. If, and that’s a big if, those things are important to you, then the “professor” may have a point. They aren’t important to me, and personally I haven’t worked with a composer that these issues were important to in probably over 10 years now. If these issues are important to you, here are a few features that I’d like to see available in D6:
Staff designer: Need a weird staff with custom lines and spacing? No problem in Finale.
Cutaway score: Again, pretty easy in Finale with staff styles, although brace and staff label positioning is a bit of a pain.
Staff labels / “group labels” in Finale: Really easy to change positioning or display of any sort of staff label on a system by system basis.
Hide key/time sigs: Display of either of these is totally customizable as needed.
Other random display stuff: Finale allows you to apply a Staff Style to customize the display of any of the following to whatever region you apply it to. Much of this can’t be customized in D5.
I wouldn’t be using D5 if I didn’t think it was the right software for me, but if you do a lot of non-CWN stuff, it’s certainly not as customizable as Finale. Lutosławski’s “Symphonic Variations” (1938) was written 85 years ago and still isn’t really possible in D5:
Check out the famous Karkoschka book “Notation in New Music.” (German 1966, English 1972) None of this is “new” anymore, but D5 can’t handle a lot of it. Some of the more graphical stuff I wouldn’t expect Dorico to ever be able to handle, but there’s lots here that Finale or SCORE could handle that D5 can’t.