Dorico’s “wait for this and that” system is too complicated and definitely not a selling point. A better design must be possible.
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This suddenly makes so much sense to me. Thank you! I, apparently like others in this thread, was struggling to understand why “Wait for Next” was necessary under any circumstances other than me intentionally selecting it, and your explanation finally cleared that up for me! Thank you 
Well, apparently I was still thinking in a “Sibelius” way here and I don’t get it why it “must” look like FredGunn stated above especially if I force one bar down … it’s annoying and really not the best design (see John_Ruggero). And the problem is not me because I understand the logic behind it know, but I bet that everybody using Dorico has had issues with this behaviour …
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Sibelius still haven’t fixed the behaviour that deleting a page break often results in two pages’ worth getting crammed onto a single page.
It’s not an easy thing to get right…
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Not to mention Finale’s “Lock systems” or whatever it was called.
I doubt it does look like Fred’s example if all one does is move a measure up or down, but it does set markers that can lead to Fred’s example if one inadvertently (or “advertently”) subsequently removes a system break.
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Yep, that’s it in a nutshell. Here’s a very contrived example where I manually set a system break:
It looked poor having a single D on the first system, and I really hate “orphaned” phrasing so I created a system break with Shift-S to bump letter A down to the next system. “Wait for next system break” is obviously not selected for the break at letter A. If I select the final D in the next passage and use , to move it to the previous system, this not only creates as system break at B, it also has changed my existing break status at A to “Wait for next system break” when this was previously not selected.
Obviously from a programming standpoint, it is entirely possible for a later break to affect the status of a previous break, as creating the break at B has now changed the status of the break at A.
If I think the system beginning with letter A is now too crowded, and I delete the break at B, I get this:
Obviously this is now a much worse situation than I previously had before I created the break at B, and it looks terrible. This situation doesn’t arise when “Wait” is invoked and there are multiple breaks following. This particularly terrible crowding situation is only when the penultimate break in a Flow is set to “Wait” and the final break is deleted, forcing the rest of the Flow on to that system. As Dorico is creating the “Wait” status in the penultimate break when , is used (and the user, knowingly or not, is not clicking this), it seems logical that Dorico is also perfectly capable of removing that status if the final break is deleted.
I would much prefer it if removing the final break in the flow reverted back to the first image instead of the third. It is very unlikely that a user will ever want the entire rest of a Flow crammed on to one system when deleting a system break, so Dorico should not default to this.
This is exactly why I don’t use . and ,. I assigned a shortcut to my Add System Break script, and I use that. Then, if I see I want 12 bars on that line instead of 10, I reduce the note spacing, or use fixed casting-off.
Those “move a bar” functions have increased the frequency of this problem at least as much as added convenience. I imagine the developers pictured them being used at the end of a job, to tweak the layout slightly. But of course less-experienced users are going to use them all the time, trying to get each page of music to look the way they want as they go. And quickly get into a mess they can’t understand.
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