In fact I think you can achieve this, though it’s been a year since I last used Dorico, so I might be wrong. Under Engraving Options/Lyrics/Spacing I have ‘Proportion of lyric width…’ set to 0 and ‘Minimum gap between adjacent lyrics’ set to -50 (ie a large negative number). Then enjoy some manual tweaking.
I agree vocal music looks so much better when rhythmic distortion is kept to a minimum. Dorico does this automatically better then other programs it seems, but there’s still room for improvement.