This has been requested before, and I agree that it would be a valuable suite of features. It would be a lot of work to implement in full generality, and presents a lot of user interface challenges, particularly in the area of how to specify what the found material should be replaced with.
The work on the next major version of Dorico is well-advanced at this point, and I can say that a comprehensive set of features for find and replace is not in our plans. But it’s definitely something that we would like to add in future versions.
The truth is that as Dorico itself matures and has such a rich set of functionality, it takes more and more work to implement new features, because each new feature has to be considered in the light of every feature that has been implemented before it. The surface area of the software is much bigger than it was even five years ago, and we really feel that when working on large features that touch many other parts of the program. And with several members of the team not working directly on Dorico itself at the moment, we are stretched thinner than we ever have been. We have also devoted at least some of our efforts to continuing to issue fixes and improvements to Dorico 5, and every one of those changes represents time that we are not spending on building new features for the next version.
Don’t worry, though: we have some great things in the works. But we don’t have capacity to spare, so we have to be very selective in what we work on. And we know that inevitably some groups of users within our incredibly broad and diverse user base will be disappointed with what comes out the other end. I will continue to preach what I always do: this isn’t the last release of the software, so hang on for the next one.