I noticed that everyone in these discussions talks about only two alternatives - programming sample libraries in DAWs or automatically producing decent playback from notation (NotePerformer, MuseSounds). Dorico’s expression maps and various playback options are trying to be somewhere in between.
We know that orchestral sample libraries were not designed to be used with notation software and that’s what NP, MS and similar technologies are trying to address. What I don’t understand is why everyone ignores the fact that sample libraries were designed not only to be programmed in DAWs, but also to be playable in real time, including expressions. Sure, programming MIDI is tedious and boring, but playing sample libraries is fun, very musical and as expressive, human and personal as you can get. Dorico supports real-time MIDI recording very well. At least in my country, composers must be able to play piano at decent level in order to graduate and that level is more than enough for playing most of the pieces I see in this discussions (at slower tempos if needed). So why is nobody even mentioning that alternative? It’s only boring tedious manual programming vs. perfect machine-generated playback.
An example:
