Thanks for the reply, benwiggy.
This is indeed a 2013 iMac. I’m not using Condensing. My hard drives are all SSD.
You are correct that a RAM upgrade is in order. However, I would like to complete this current project before any hardware upgrades. With an eye to this fact, I reformatted my drives and ran a clean install of my whole system in March of this year. All other programs have been running smoothly since that clean install; I can still perform processor-heavy audio editing in Logic with no crashes. There is nothing else showing in the Activity Monitor that could be causing these kinds of constant delays.
As a stop-gap, I have unregistered unnecessary audio engines in the Steinberg Library Manager. I have also broken my large Dorico file into multiple files, one for each Flow in this multi-movement work. This might (?) get me over the finish line on this project, but the program is still painfully slow.
I’ll run a diagnostic report.
In the meantime, I would love to hear other suggestions about how to reduce Dorico’s CPU and memory usage.