Hi Grant. I’m glad you’re enjoying things so far. It’s useful to know that there’s a general principle in Dorico that a project is self-contained, and has all it needs to be displayed, printed and played back (notwithstanding external items such as fonts and plugins). This is intended to make it easier to transfer projects between multiple machines or sending a version to another person. It also means that you don’t accidentally change the playback of another project while you are editing the current one.
When you apply a Playback Template (including when it is applied automatically on creating a new project or adding a new Player), a copy of all the Expression Maps needed by that template are copied into the project from the ‘Default Library’. Any changes you make to the expression map stay in that project. If you create an Endpoint Config then the Expression Map from that project is saved in the config. When you apply a Playback Template, then the expression maps are imported from the endpoint configs if it doesn’t already exist in the project. If the version number of the expression map is higher then it will be updated.
In general, what I would recommend is to maintain projects for your section templates. So for example create a new string quartet project and set up the plugins and expression maps (you could apply the playback template that you already have). Add a variety of note lengths, dynamic levels and techniques, so you can use this as a testbed for your expression maps and plugin setup. Save this as ‘EWSO Gold String Quartet Template.dorico’. Export the endpoint config from this project. If you later want to make changes to the expression maps, change them in this project, increment the version number and re-export the endpoint config. In other projects that use the playback template, applying the playback template again should cause it to update to the new expression map. Or you can import (or drag & drop) it directly in the expression map editor.
We know that there are some missing bits at the moment in terms of making it easier to manage things in the default library and the project, that we hope to address in the future.
If you haven’t already, please have a look at the walkthrough for creating section templates in the sticky thread at the top of the forum.