Can someone help me figure out why this is happening, and how to fix it? The seconds here should be much closer to each other, with the stems aligned. Nothing under Notation options → Voices seems to be relevant or have an effect on this.
Hi @Grayberg, this is the option that you are looking for (you can set also a negative value to have the voices touch or even overlap 
, if desired…) :
Engraving Options/Notes/Voices/Gap between adjacent noteheads in different voices: :
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Thanks, that worked. Phew.
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Not wanting to be contrary in the slightest, but I really don’t think that is the preferred spacing. Of course as has already been shown, you do have the option, but I wouldn’t say “should.“
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What looks best depends on the music font and attendant line widths. This Finale Maestro, with thinner stems, wants to be closer than Dorico’s setting for Bravura.
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Here’s the first score I pulled from my hard drive randomly to find an example for you.
I’m not sure what it is about the culture around Dorico that leads to requests by composers being met with “the software knows better” – this is prevalent in the Facebook groups as well.
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Sorry you took it that way. I was just being conversational.
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The Dorico Default are only a starting point.
If this
would be the case, you would not have an option that you can customise and Save as Default (clicking Save as Default button in the Options dialogue)
I think you misunderstood my point. I meant that tons of questions posted online are answered with: “Well, what you are trying to do is incorrect.” I’ve seen people conclude their posts with “can we skip talking about whether I should notate X, Y, or Z this way?”, and still the responses often include quite a bit of 'splaining.
Sorry if some answers gave you that feeling.
In this wonderful Forum, there are high professional Engravers and Editors, and yes there are some Engraving Conventions, to be found in many books.
And as said Dorico gives you the options to customise those conventions.
Here an interesting thread (and one post from it):
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@dan_kreider is one of the most polite and helpful people around here. 
(And just to play “devil’s advocat” for a second: You say that Dorico people tend to feel their software is doing things the correct way. That for sure is right, at least up to a point. But I’ve seen just as many people coming from Finale complaining that Dorico can’t do things the Finale way and that’s the only way they would ever like it. So I think we are on the same level )
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There is the issue in general that default settings imply an opinion of correct notation, and people get used to them and start to recognize them as “right”. This is improving with generations of software. It was kind of awful with Finale’s original defaults, which propagated some frankly bad notation and spacing in more cheaply published (less expertly edited) music. And we are still seeing some of the effects even now, with Finale switchers wanting brackets and other things that were only ever done by Finale and should not have become standards.
I think unfortunately the ’splaining is just going to keep happening because we’re all musicians here (including the Dorico team), with our different experiences and opinions of how scores should look, and we disagree all the time. But it shouldn’t be presented (nor taken) to mean “Dorico’s defaults are the only right way”, or even that something Dorico can’t do yet without a workaround is “wrong”. There are plenty of people to say what’s wrong, and always someone to disagree.
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Good points, and no issue with anything said here. Just to clarify that I, too, was talking about people, as in, the culture. Particularly in some of the Facebook groups, the unsolicited incorrect advice on notation can get absurd, and definitely doesn’t make the forced transition into a new software any less frustrating.