For my needs, Dorico needs to send the notes pitch-bent. Using only simple low-limit accidentals, I can easily have hundreds of different pitches per octave. This is stuff that is easy to tune when played live - not anything exotic.
Looking at how Dorico handles cues, I think that it may allow multiple pitch bending on the same stave, just not sent to the same instance of an instrument.
Finale is able to notate equal divisions of the octave (quarter-tones, 19-equal, 31-equal, 22-equal and so on) using any accidental symbols and midi playback without pitchbend, polyphonically on a single staff. The accidental symbols send the corresponding number of steps in midi notes while the instrument is pre-tuned in the equal division in question using a tuning script such as .scl, .tun, MTS etc. Dorico could very well implement this existing technique, as well as pitchbend messages, while we are waiting all these years for the new VST3 method. And in any case, it seems that Dorico’s microtonal implementation will lack Just Intonation and unequal scales, for which we’ll then have to recourse to pitchbend (as in Finale and Sibelius) - when midi editing becomes possible.
I still don’t get the technical problem with JI and unequal scales. Set pitches for the white notes. Set cents + or - for each accidental. Combine accidentals properly (which would mean I don’t need the 768 individual accidentals I use in F…).
I have no idea whether VST 3 can do this, or whether it can do it polyphonically, but pitchbend works fine in Finale.
For JI in Finale, I do the same as you - re-tune the white notes in a re-tunable synth, and then use accidentals with pitchbend assignments. Perhaps that can be done in VST3, too, making pitchbend unnecessary and polyphony possible on a single channel. I have a feeling that no-one yet knows how microtones can be implemented in VST3, but while they’re figuring out I wish they’d give us the standard methods so I could finally start writing music in Dorico which I purchased one and a half years ago.
The message from Dorico has often been that only equal divisions will be supported (in playback). I certainly hope this is not the case. This means that for JI, we will have to use microtonal accidentals without playback, and add pitchbend editing by hand, when (if?) that becomes possible.