Nice historical examples in the article – but I’m unimpressed with the author’s readings of them. And he displayed ignorance with the ridiculous macaronic word “crescendoing”. “Crescendo” is already a participle in Italian. This is equivalent to “increasingando”.
“Poco forte” is another indication frequently misunderstood. It’s easy to assume (as Daniel Türk did in 1789) that it means “a little bit loud”, but in Italian (and the way Brahms used it) a better English translation would be not so loud or not too strong.
I still hope for an official response to the OP’s two points:
- The Combined Dynamics panel presents pf by default, a relatively obscure marking, for which (as the article shows) there has never been consensus of intended meaning. So everyone has to click the ⇄ button the first time (first finding it and intuiting what it does) before inserting a marking. Why not offer fp by default, which is the most frequently needed and has a widely and easily understood meaning?
- In Dorico 3.5 sfp can only be entered with an abbreviation of subito, which is incorrect, and explains why it took me 2 days to find out how to do it. This is not just annoying to pedants like me; it dangerously spreads wrong information about notation to less educated users. (I note that sf can be entered as an immediate marking, without Properties insisting that it is an abbreviation of subito forte (although it can also be entered as the latter).)
And if I may add two points of my own about the Dynamics panel:
- I expected the +/– buttons in Combined Dynamics to in/decrease the dynamic level, especially because the scale includes mp and mf. But on trying them, they seem to mean “in/decrease the number of symbols (except for mp and mf)”. So they work as expected for fortes, but backwards for pianos.
- I was expecting the various text buttons (subito, possibile, etc.) to toggle, but they don’t. Once you have clicked one, it appears it cannot be undone except immediately with Undo. You have to delete and replace, yes?