These kinds of UI issues remind me of the early history of Apple. When the Macintosh first came out, there were no keyboard shortcuts: you had to use the mouse for every single menu command. The Mac started with a very strict system which reflected the philosophy and structure of the user interface, and as it grew, it gradually became more flexible.
I suspect that Dorico is similar. The team designed the program the way it is for good reasons, and if we use it in the way it’s designed to be used, we are working with it instead of against it. But there are lots of exceptional use cases, as this thread shows, and as Dorico grows it can accommodate them with more flexibility.
Another meta-issue I keep thinking of is the early history of Yahoo vs. Google. Yahoo wanted to categorize every single website, and fit them all into a hierarchical structure - on its homepage you could click on politics or culture, etc., and see all of the nascent web, neatly categorized. Google did the opposite, a flat search hierarchy. And of course Google won - the web grew way too fast, and had too many “exceptional use cases”, to be organized hierarchically. The semantic approach of Dorico is powerful, but eventually in music (or probably any human endeavor) we hit the point where it’s impossible to handle every use case semantically. It’s impossible to foresee everything, and the more you try to accommodate special use cases, the more cumbersome the program grows. Where is the point when you say, “OK, screw it, let’s just be able (for example) to arbitrarily hide/show stuff, because it’s impossible to figure out every use case”? Then, people could use the program more easily, perhaps, but they wouldn’t be taking advantage of its capabilities.
A final analogy: you can use HTML tables to design your website, but you will be much better off using CSS for graphics, and using HTML for the semantic organization. We can think of Write mode as HTML, and Engrave mode as CSS. Hide/Show capability straddles the semantic/graphical divide in some ways, which makes it interesting (and difficult) to handle.