I remember this in Finale as well! Too bad we can’t merge the best of both . . .
BTW, FredGUnn: way back in January, 2021, you posted an intriguing way of producing some aspects of a cutaway score (Cutaway scores - #17 by Romanos). I’m unfortunately at an earlier stage of knowledge with Dorico, so some of your explanation is over my head. You wrote:
I didn’t bother trying to get this exactly, but you can get pretty close in Dorico. Step 1 is hacking your instruments.xml file to create an instrument with a 0-line staff. Add it to any player that will be cut away at some point and treat it like a double. Place hidden notes as needed to force the “instrument” changes wherever you want. Initial barlines are just added as Playing Techniques. Instrument names are Shift-X text. Music Symbols/G clef (small) needs to be set to the same clef as the regular G clef and then sized as enlarging the smaller one makes the optical difference of the smaller design fairly obvious. I used two graphical elements here to hide the names and lines at the beginning of the system, shown in pink, as I couldn’t think of a way around that.
I don’t know anything about .xml files, but is it possible to create a 0-line staff within Dorico’s normal operation? As well, although I’ve never tried it, I’m assuming that Dorico allows us to assign more than one instrument to a staff, and gives us some way of indicating the change of instrument – is that correct?