Here’s a comparison I did a few years ago of some different ratios and their effect when the casting off is fixed and no system is overfull:
I seriously doubt anyone will choose a ratio of 2 or 1, so the rest is what you prefer in between. With lots of smaller note values, the minimum space for short notes value obviously comes into play and skews the spacing accordingly, so I didn’t include many here. This obviously is a bit of a contrived example, so you may have different preferences on actual music.
The Sib values are kind of bonkers, so 1.35 isn’t really an accurate comparison. By default, Sib doesn’t use a ratio, but uses the equivalent of Finale’s allotment library. All ratios are 1.3 or 1.38 except for the half to quarter ratio which is 1.7, so it’s not really possible to do an accurate Sib comparison within Dorico.
I used 1.619 in Finale for years, but at some point switched to 1.5 and have just continued with that ever since I switched to Dorico.
