As of version 2, I now use Dorico exclusively, replacing Sibelius for me. It’s easy to worry about bugs and limitations, but in fact there are just as many occasions when I’m pleasantly surprised by something I discover in Dorico that hints at just how many light-years ahead of the competition its underlying architecture is.
One family of pleasant discoveries is where I realise that Dorico simply doesn’t care how complicated something is – it just does it right, natively. Tuplets are the obvious example: I haven’t had to do any mental arithmetic since I switched away from Sibelius. Elegant spacing of three or more voices is another big one.
The other family of pleasant discoveries is when something that really is simple, in musical terms, turns out to be blissfully simple in Dorico too. I just spent the last few minutes fretting about how to break a bar across a system, imagining I had to create bars of irregular length, hide time signatures and so forth. Nope. I can just break the bar where I want it. And to cut a 4/4 bar into two 2/4 bars, I just put a barline in the middle of the bar. Ahhhh!
Now all I have to do is figure out how to save up the mental energy saved from not having to figure out how the program thinks about something and feed that back into improved musical creativity…