Just to add my $0.02 FWIW:
- When I used Finale for over 30 years, I always used Page View when I composed and created scores. Except for very early on, I always liked to see how things were laid out, and as stated, there was no separate mode for note entry and page layout (although there was, and still is, a page layout tool).
- But as others have stated, it’s no different from Dorico. You do indeed see page layout while in Write Mode if you use Page View rather than Galley View. I generally don’t have to do much in Engrave Mode except for minor tweaks to systems or to input where I want some of the text tokens to go within a page template.
- With the new work I started inputting today, I did revert to Galley View, if for no other reason than to restrain my normal impulse to do things in Page View and make some occasional tweaks to the layout. I likely will stick to this for the foreseeable future, since with Dorico there is not a lot of page layout I will need to make (unlike Finale, where I even tended to resort to a pricey .lua script to adjust many page layout elements, often to no avail or to worse results).
- I sometimes do find that I’ve made some changes that were unintended, but never in Engrave Mode. It happens in Write Mode if I’ve accidentally hit a key without realizing it while Note Input was active (it’s pretty easy to do, which is why I always have Pitch Before Duration active by default, since that prevents my accidentally inputting notes). In all honesty, I’d had similar things happen in Finale, if I was trying something out on my synthesizer after forgetting to switch off my Caps Lock key while in Speedy Entry (it locks a duration, just like Duration Before Pitch in Dorico).
Overall, I think the separation of functions/modes in Dorico makes rational sense, but for my purposes I’d be fine if I could tweak some Engrave Mode elements while in Write Mode (just as one could move one or more measures to an adjacent system in Finale with an up/down arrow without a need for a separate mode). YMMV.