Will it in the future be possible to select staff names directly?
I often want to include/remove these on an ad hoc. basis for clarity.
It probably won’t be possible to select them directly, no, but I can imagine that it would be possible to create some kind of “staff label visibility change” event that would specify that there should be some kind of override to the settings in Layout Options, in much the same way as the “note spacing change” event works (or will work, in 1.0.20).
Hi Daniel,
My immediate response to a ‘staff level visibility change event’ rather than ‘select: delete’ is not very kind… 
I’m sure that there is some (good) philosophy behind this - would you mind explaining further? The question is genuine!
The fundamental issue is that staves in Dorico are transitory creatures, unlike in other scoring programs where the top-level container for musical information is the staff (then the bar, etc.). In Dorico everything exists in streams and the staves are created, system by system if necessary, to accommodate those streams. This underlying design is what will allow Dorico to handle things like automatically condensing a full score into a conductor’s score or handling divisi intelligently, once we’ve had a chance to continue the work we have already done in this area.
One consequence of this, though, is that staves don’t just exist from start to finish in a flow, and things like staff labels are likewise conjured up as needed to label the staves that exist on a given system, in a dynamic fashion. We can therefore not easily make it possible for you to interact directly with them, because they’re not really there. But I believe we can achieve the flexibility you require through other means, though for the time being you’ll just have to trust me on that one.
So does this mean that if I wish, for instance, to print out scores/parts with the staff name at the beginning of the piece but do not want to print the abbreviated names for subsequent systems there’s no way to accomplish this?
You can do it.
Setup Mode: Layout Options: Staves and Systems
You can choose differently for each layout (scores or parts).