Oh, the rhythm dots setting might do it, gotcha. I guess it’s probably easier to use force duration for the dots than a common rhythm.
Actually, neither of these are impossible 
No idea what that might break, of course.
It appears to break a lot unfortunately LOL!
Meh. Set your beam grouping to split at beam boundaries.
But yeah, if you don’t like three eighths beamed together like so, this isn’t a good option:
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Yeah, in 4/4 I never group 3 together to avoid possible confusion with a tuplet.
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I guess it depends on context. I’ve seen a lot of baroque music that does this. In those cases, at least, it’s fairly evident they are groupings of four just missing one note, rather than a triplet. But your practice is probably preferable on the whole.
Plenty of music does that and it’s perfectly acceptable. For a piano part that will be practiced until memorized, sure, that certainly doesn’t really matter at all. Much of what I do though will either be for a recording session, or will be for a gig where most everyone is sightreading in crummy lighting after a few glasses of wine. In those contexts anything that will minimize a chance of error is worth it!
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I write a lot of pieces in open meter, where Dorico is just guessing around when to use ties and when to put in the actually entered note duration as is.
At least in open meter, (quasi) force duration should be the norm.
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I do a lot of copying from hymnals. It’s not uncommon that I need to duplicate exactly the notation given, even though sometimes it’s not strictly correct. I would also love the option to make Force Duration sticky. I can’t always keep track of all the Notation options. It’s much more preferable to have the confidence to know that the durations I put in will be exactly what is displayed.
Probably the most common scenario here is when there are a different number of syllables in different stanzas, so stanza one may be one syllable on a half note, and stanza two may be two syllables on quarter notes tied together. In this case, I have to be careful to always turn on force duration so that Dorico doesn’t convert the tied quarters to a half note.
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Being no expert in autohotkey macros, but being very interested in having this functionality, I’m wondering whether you have simple instructions for doing this. Because when I googled, I got something that was way too complex to mess with.
I’ve found a way to keep it on… something that I found awhile ago somewhere on this forum. With your time signature (such as 4/4) surround the upper 4 with brackets like this [4]/4. Visually you see 4/4 on your sheet, but it forces the Force Duration on. I use it all of the time these days…
I just tried it on 3/4 time it kind of works and it seems that when you stop writing the time signature reverts back to one without the brackets… hmmm…
Going back to the 4/4 time it still seems to work… so I’m puzzled at the moment…
Doug 
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It may be that a custom beam grouping (in the time signature) happens to achieve what you’d otherwise achieve via Force Duration, but it’s coincidental and won’t always be what you want.
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Yeah, sorta but not really. Which reminds me of a question re custom beam groupings, but that is another post.