Dorico is usually very good at avoiding conflict between notes in different voices, but here’s a case where it’s perhaps a bit too aggressive:
Is there an Option to make these line up, or do I ‘just’ have to Merge the Voices?
You can set all of their voice column indexes to 0, but you’ll end up with double flags on the bottom voices:
Probably easiest to select, filter downstem voices, change downstem voice 1.
Yes, you should merge the two down-stem voices. I think what Dorico is doing here is both reasonable and, more to the point, correct.
Fair enough. It’s the result of a Paste > Reduce, though; so it would be nice if Dorico put notes of a similar rhythm into the same voice?
That would be undesirable behaviour if, for instance, you were reducing from open SATB score to choral reduction (S and T upstem, A and B downstem).
I daresay that in the future we could add more options for how voices should be disposed when doing a Reduce operation.
It’s easy enough to select the concerned notes and change their voice to both be “downstem voice 1” and that will take care of it for you without having to reenter.
Dorico’s default here looks correct to me.
If you really wanted to do this (for example to reproduce an old edition of baroque music engraved in this style) you could try playing with the engraving options properties for rhythm dots. In the “chord” in bar 2 you can probably persuade Dorico to put all the dots after all the notes, which is a bit more compact and easier to read.