May I ask why scores for a single instrument contain both a full score and a solo instrument score? These are one and the same, so as far as I can tell the solo part is merely a duplicate of the full score. It does get confusing and, to me, makes for unnecessary clicks. Shouldn’t scores for a single instrument only have a single score? Is there any way to make this happen in setup? If not, can the duplicate score simply be hidden from the interface in an update? Or am I missing something?
It’s just a product of the fact that all instruments have a Part created for them, and they also appear in the full score. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem: just delete the part layout.
The part layout will of course use separate Layout Options (and Notation Options) from the score layout, so they could be different, which might be useful.
Is there any reason to utilize one or the other in a solo instrument project? eg. Are there differences in the default settings for “Full score” and “Part” layouts for various instruments (in my case, solo piano)?
Yes, they are different. For example the default parts layout has the instrument name at the top left of the first page.
You probably don’t want that for a solo piano piece, of course.
I noticed the part name thing, but are there more notation-specific differences that might take place in the solo Piano layout vs. the Full Score layout?
If Dorico makes better visual choices for a piano part (or any solo instrument) in the solo part layout, I imagine you could just edit the part to not include the instrument name in the corner and reap the other benefits of using the solo part.
All layouts depend on the options that are set in Layout Options. It’s easy enough to make a score layout look like a part, or a part layout look like a score; they just have different factory defaults.