Hi Rich, sorry that you’ve had difficulties with the documentation. We do have to segment it so that in general, longer explanations are separate from steps so that task-oriented pages are just that. It also helps us maintain consistent and accurate manuals. You should find that any hints towards other things you can do (“You can also…”) should have wording that matches related links at the bottom in most cases, which give you the required information about doing that thing.
When it comes to master pages, it’s a tricky thing to cover because it’s an incredibly flexible tool - more or less whatever you want a master page to do or be, it can do or be. Therefore, we try to provide enough documentation so you can understand what they are, how they work, and what Dorico does by default so that you can go onwards and use them however you need.
I’ve already made a note to see whether I can include a couple of common requirements somewhere, and added a more specific explanation of the default master pages to the revamped “First steps” section of the manual (which will be available soon as a separate guide). You can see a “preview” of that here -
If it helps, here are some links to the most recent manual (the link you shared was from the v2 manual, and I’ve done some updating in this area since then to try to cover more common use-cases).
The descriptions of the different master pages types includes mention of project vs flow tokens used by default. (This more general introduction to master pages might also be useful.)
For further information about tokens, see here. There’s a note on that page about how flow tokens behave, especially in relation to where the token exists on a page relative to music frames.