I think they are different, they were different when I reopened the file, but it’s possible I screwed that up when exporting. They are really close though and both seem like derivatives of New Century Schoolbook to me. (I seem to recall Daniel mentioning that influence during development, but perhaps I’m remembering wrong.) Here’s a comparison:
“Edwin”, named after Edwin Ginn, the American philanthropist who commissioned New Century Schoolbook.
“Academico”: a Schoolbook for Dorico.
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There is already a smufl font used with MusSco2 called Gootville (2014). Both Leland and Goodville are nice anyway.
The thing that jumps out to me immediately about the new font is the whispy/compressed flat symbols. Rather ugly to my eye although I’m sure someone else will love them. Otherwise, the “inspiration” seems quite heavy.
I didn’t catch that! Did he post that on a blog somewhere?
I’m always excited to see new notation fonts appear—but so far, frankly, I’ve seen no advantage in using any of them in lieu of Opus, Sibelius’s default font.
The first thing I always notice is that, in other fonts, the accidentals are so relatively narrow. It’s true that making them slightly wider takes more space, but it seems worthwhile in terms of legibility.
I took a line from the sample notation above and notated it in Opus. Here it is alongside Leland. Don’t you find Opus more readable? I do. (I’ve also corrected some of the notation oversights in the Leland sample—e.g. note and accidental spacing, stem direction, length of arpeggio line, consistency of tuple-number placement—though I realize this is more anal than font-related. 
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Both Opus and Helsinki have some nice features - and also some less attractive ones. Between them, they make a nice font. (Similarly, many Finale users combine Maestro and Engraver to get the best of each).
With Finale’s move to SMuFL in their forthcoming version, and MuseScore, Lilypond and ‘others’ already signed-up, Sibelius is still playing catch-up.
Yes, but my understanding is that SMuFL isn’t a font; it’s a notion specification, like MusicXML—so aren’t we talking “apples and oranges” here?
BTW, the staff lines in the Opus example appear lighter here just because of the screenshot resolution I used… The actual fonts don’t affect that.
This thread’s gone in a few directions. Yes, SMuFL is a standard, and one that Sibelius doesn’t support. That means that us Dorico users have no way of using Opus or Helsinki within Dorico (or Finale, or MuseScore), and Sibelius users have no standardised way of using Leland or any other SMuFL fonts within Sibelius. (I say “standardised” because of course a team of people have ported Bravura and Petaluma over to Sibelius’s way of handling fonts.)