Sorry if this has been discussed in another thread and I have missed it. I have been using Finale for twenty-four years and really like it. However now I am getting to grips with Dorico I like it more and may not use Finale to start a project again. Is it worth upgrading to Finale 27 only to get a more accurate transfer of scores into Dorico? Or would the advantages be minimal? I understand it may be too early for anyone to have done this extensively but any opinions appreciated.
If your only reason to upgrade to Finale 27 is MusicXML 4.0, you may as well keep your cash in the bank for now - Finale is basically the only program out there that currently supports MusicXML 4.0. This isn’t Dorico’s fault, of course; MusicXML 4.0 was only finalised a few weeks ago.
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And XML 4.0 and SMuFL support are essentially all F27 has to offer anyway.
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Many thanks for your replies pianoleo and Romanos401 - exactly the answer I needed.
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I’ve been transferring my scores to Dorico from Finale 26 perfectly well. There’s a bit of tidying up, but I doubt XML 4.0 will change that - mostly elements that are text in Finale which in Dorico need to be ‘things’, e.g. ‘cresc’, Fig Bass, etc.
It’s very easy to start liking Finale in the 90s, while time ticks by, until a quarter-century has past, and you still like it for the same reasons you did all those years ago. And then something like Dorico comes along and shows you what progress is.
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Thanks for your reply benwiggy. I have only imported one score into Dorico from Finale 26 and as you said, the word crescendo was different, it ended up above the staff. As I was doing a new version for a different group of instruments I had to go through the score thoroughly anyway.
One thing I like about Finale is that when you have a font such as November 2, you can choose a few new symbols and add them them to the library. In some ways it is like a language, once you have become comfortable with the quirks, it is both easy and enjoyable to use. However Dorico is a few generations on and the music seems to look good without any effort. Sometimes I would spent hours getting layouts right in Finale, and the individual parts were invariably a jumbled mess.
Dorico’s Playing Techniques are pretty much like Expressions/Artics in Finale: you can add new ones to and save them as defaults for all new documents.
“Spending Hours” and “A jumbled mess” would seem to be at odds with “easy and enjoyable”. 
Finale’s one benefit is the flexibility, but that comes at the price of no help whatsoever. It lets you do it all. Out of Dorico, MuseScore, Sibelius and Finale, only Finale has no collision avoidance or vertical justification. Subdividing secondary beams still has to be done by hand. Plug-ins must be run, and re-run. Linked Parts have so many quirks that it’s often easiest to duplicate the .musx file for the parts.
The whole point of computers is to do tedious, repetitive sequential work. If you’re doing it, rather than the computer, then something is wrong!
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