I think this was great! I’m in the camp that would prefer to mostly let Daniel and the team handle things without endless, mostly redundant feedback from us but you’ve addressed lots of little things that I think would make things much smoother and I personally appreciate them being brought up. Just a couple comments:
I received the trial activation key on November 30th, but have only managed to install Dorico a week later
It begins once you activate it, this is just a poorly-done email notice.
After selecting the “hide empty staves” option in layout options dialog, one needs to switch to Engrave mode in order for the score to reflect the change.
Unless I’m misunderstanding, this is perfectly logical. In Write Mode, whether you’re in galley view or not, you need to be able to see all of the staves in order to quickly go to them to enter more music if you’d like. Engrave mode no longer cares about empty measures though, thus its ability to hide the empty staves.