Hello cooney, and welcome to the forum.
You are spot on, doing the first steps in Dorico, this comes over as very unintuitive. Worse, I remember my first encounter with Dorico; I even got the impression, a teacher is looking over my shoulder and is correcting, what I was putting down “to paper”. That is not easy to take for creative people. After a while one does though understand the whole concept and the basic separation of content and display. It even becomes enjoyable to get a new approach on things one had taken for granted.
Please try to have nice times - you can be sure, the developers have an extreme close look to user feedback. So if you have further issues you can happily post them in this forum - before getting upset 
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Welcome to the forum. I’ll not rise to your bait.
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I press ESC to clear the caret and click outside the staff; then I can doodle away without entering any notes.
As far as how I worked when I was using pencil and paper (not to mention transparency sheets and India ink), any time I gained by dotting a ties note was lost to hand copying parts: I’m sure neither of us wants to revisit that era). I’m glad Daniel has suggested we may one day have an option to use Dorico as you wish, but until then, it is not so hard to adapt to what is available.
For all Dorico’s new way of doing things, frustration comes not from the program but from the user, as does patience.
Wow. Thanks the sage words of paternalistic, patronizing wisdom.
Are you seriously implying that I have to choose between being able to add a dot to a note (something easy to do in all other notation programs) and copying parts by hand?
Cooney, yes people are seriously trying to help
you here.
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