The new figured bass

I’ve just started to play with the figured bass and my main criticism is the assumption of too much information…
E.g., I want a #, i.e., 5,#3 and all I want and what most players want is just the sharp and what do you get? #5,# (an augmented triad??). If I did the same thing with ‘b’ I get what I want: a flat and nothing else (5,b3 understood). There’s some degree of inconsistency here…
I’m sure there is a way (I hope there is) to reduce the amount of information inputting figured bass or maybe a little bit of tweeking to make this more like figured bass. Apologies for the irony.

From the scoringnotes.com review:
“If you find that you’re struggling to get the exact figures you want, go to the Figured Bass page of Write mode > Note Input Options and select Follow input literally.“

Wouldn’t it make sense to start with it defaulting to ‘literally’ rather than assuming that the people who will be using it are less expert in it’s conventions?

And wouldn’t it make sense to have any such alterations to the default to be part of the general engraving setups. This is not a sensible workflow.

I have to add that I did just that. Went looking for setup adjustments in the project and options engraving setups and, of course, didn’t find it!

Carlo, if you type # into the figured bass popover, I would expect you to get underlying figures of 5,#3 and not an augmented fifth, so there must be something about the musical context in which you were writing that caused Dorico to choose those figures. If you’d like to provide a short example that shows the scenario in question, we’d be happy to look into it.

Did you read any of the information about figured bass in the Version History before you started working with the feature? There’s only a couple of pages of information to digest there, but the very first thing I wrote about is the distinction between following the engraving options and taking the input literally. I know it’s boring to look at the documentation, but it’s there to try to avoid you getting stuck at the first hurdle. I’m not sure I can envision a way in which we could provide the necessary flexibility required for a functional area with as much subtlety and sophistication as figured bass in such a way that it would be unnecessary to at least glance at the documentation. If you did read the Version History and this didn’t come across, please let me know what about the documentation didn’t make sense to you, so I can try to improve it in future. Thanks!