While I respect your opinion, this is not about tantacrul, and talking about him personally is not appropriate for this thread.
As we speak, I am having to remove ties (and reinput them later) because I want a hairpin to apply to to the last quarter-note of a tied note. I have to do that because even using the grid will not allow me to enter a hairpin. Unless there is something I’m missing (which is very much a possibility as I’m relatively new to Dorico), this is a major flaw in a program that is marked it as a composition program. Hopefully there’s something I don’t know about that makes this simpler.
This is why it’s good to explain what you try to do. We can help. Yes, it is perfectly possible (and more accurately than in any other notation program, I mean it) to input that hairpin. It involves the caret ; place it at the beginning of the hairpin, press < (if it’s cresc). Nothing happens because it has no duration so far. Press 6 (quarter note duration, press space. Now your hairpin is one quarter note long. No matter how you format your score, the quarter note value is oart of that hairpin, it’s not just that it looks like a quarter note long hairpin.
Hope this helps!
Or just put the caret where you want the hairpin to start, type < or > then advance the caret to where you want the hairpin to end and type ? (or Shift-D and then the dynamic you want to end the hairpin with, then Enter).
But this is definitely not obvious and it seems like a lot of steps for something so simple. Sibelius would have just required to select the note itself and apply the hairpin (2 steps). Rather than selecting some part of the note (step 1), moving over to the right rhythmic position (step 2: this actually involves 2 parts because selecting the note and engaging note input will put you in the wrong position, and you will have to press keys maybe 10 times before you get to the right position. Not to mention having your hands move between the mouse/arrow keys, SHIFT + N, etc… which takes even more time), applying a hairpin (step 3), choosing the rhythmic duration of the hairpin (step 4), pressing enter or something to apply the hairpin (step 5).
This just seems unnecessary to me. Also, I would personally always use the same duration for the hairpin and the note so step 4 is redundant. Even if I wanted a hairpin on the second half of a whole note, I would just use two half notes and tie them together.