Normally pressing ALT or CTRL (IIRC) while starting Dorico leads one to Elements and SE, but I believe this is temporarily unavailable in this initial release of Dorico 4.
I hope this can be fixed before the trial version comes out, as I am a great believer that prospective Dorico users should opt for the Pro trial so that they can try out all three versions via the special startup feature, if they wish, before buying.
It seems to be, but it seems hit or miss for me. After several tries, I was able to bring Dorico 4.0.10 up as Elements this morning. It is hard to find documentation of which keys to press (perhaps because it wasn’t functional in 4.0) but I heartily recommend those who use the trial version (is that out yet?) to go for the Pro trial so they can sample the others (and it may whet the appetite of those who thought they only needed Elements )
I agree that ideally it would be possible simply to download Dorico SE without first needing to receive a Download Access Code, and you should then be able to sign in with your existing Steinberg ID (or make a new one) when running the software for the first time, and that is where we are headed, but we are still at the beginning of the journey with Steinberg Licensing, and it is not only the licensing but also all of the other systems around software distribution and deployment that need to be modified correspondingly.
To smooth customer acquisition, I’d say, ideally, trials and free versions, would be an installer that just installed (no interim download manager) and asked users to sign-up from within the application? (no online account first)