Write mode won’t allow me to break the beam of the first 16th note in the cue. Selecting and breaking the cue beam in Engrave mode actually breaks it in the regular part, which I do not want.
What Dorico is showing you here is exactly as intended, to make clear that the note is part of a beamed group. It’s helpful context for the player, who can tell the difference between a flagged note (which would imply that there’s no other note immediately before this one) and a beamed one. Far be it from me to tell you what you should cue, but you might want to consider giving the player a bit more context here.
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I see what you’re saying, but the bigger problem is that I’m forced to use cues to indicate above-the-staff rhythmic “Hits” across multiple parts (without having to write them as a separate voice for each part, clean up the rests, fix the stems, and change the scale every single time). Dorico has no other way of doing this as far as I’m aware. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
As a jazz drummer, I don’t really care what the instrument was doing beforehand: I just need to know when the hit is, and what pattern I’m filling around.
The reality is that we should be able to break the beam if we want to, right? At the end of the day it just looks bad. If I wanted to show the whole grouping I would, but I don’t because that would suggest that the musician should count those as part of the “hits”.
Dorico is really not considering non- orchestral/Western concert music enough: everything seems to be forcing us into this lens of “standards”.
I think the single sixteenth anticipation would be clear to a percussionist.
If one really wants a single flagged sixteenth there, one can create a separate, hidden staff from which to cue rather than asking the Development Team to take time away from more pressing improvements to address a personal concern.
Yeah, cool, despite paying many hundreds of dollars over multiple years, I’ll just keep my head down and accept mediocre solutions that require 2x as much work instead of pointing out flawed logic in the design! 
No one said that more advanced programs would absolve composers/engravers from additional work to achieve specific effects.
I’m just pointing out that I should be able to break a beam wherever and whenever I want to in engrave mode without the program nannying or fighting me. Just like when it doesn’t listen to me when I click “Force Stem Direction”…what part of the word “Force” isn’t clear? There should be no extra work required for this. The lengths I have to go to to make something look marginally professional in this or any notation software I’ve used is completely unacceptable.
Well, would it really be so difficult to copy existing music into a dedicated cue-source staff, and cue everything from there?
At least from your example it looks like the piano hits are identical for left and right hand… 
Change the cue staff’s noteheads to slashes, and it even looks just like the real book…
And you could break beams all day long in that invisible source staff.
B.