Micro-tonal playback has always been a bit of a pain with Scoring Packages for me. You are correct that Finale is presently the best option for building such scores and making them play back. The reason being, you can make your own symbols and attach MIDI events directly to them, and when that’s not enough you’ve still got the MIDI Tool where you can insert channel events manually.
Eventually Dorico will give us a similar ability I’m sure. Once they put some way in the UI for us to make ‘custom’ techniques/nodes, and link them with any text or symbol we want, and add tools to use your own custom graphical symbols, etc…it’ll be quite similar to working with Finale. Step 1, you’ll create a new node name. Step 2, you’ll build a technique in the expressionmap to interpret that technique (send CC events, or whatever). Getting note expression dialogues or a CC lane on the play tab will achieve the same goals as the MIDI Tool in Finale.
One thing I wish Finale would implement, is an unlimited number of CC Events one can attach to an HP technique. As it stands I think we can only send 2 or three at a time…so I’m having to toggle multiple techniques and run an ‘apply HP’ pass, or use the MIDI tool more than I’d like. This is one thing Dorico has nipped in the bud already…you can send as many events as you like in a single technique. I also wish we could create our own HP nodes (such as sautille, sul tasto, etc.), and that we could get some comprehensive documentation on how Finale decides to auto-interpret the existing nodes.
Another area will Dorico does not yet have any features implemented is in generating grooves. With some practice, Finale is pretty outstanding in being able to apply grooves to a selection of bars. In theory, it won’t be very difficult to add such features to Dorico…but who knows when we’ll see it happen?
I do think the Dorico team has priorities in the right place thus far. Note entry, work flow, and Engraving quality really does need to be top priority at this point. Getting things like fully functional percussion mapping, slates of handy copy/paste tools, etc…yep, all that really needs to be solid ASAP. Once that stuff is in place, adding playback features should be relatively easy…as the underlying sequencer, audio engine, and even HALion is very mature and robust…it’s probably mostly a matter of deciding how the UI should look and act, and implementing code already existing (and well tested through CuBase/Nuendo) in the playback engine.
In short, once they have the Scoring foundation in place…playback features will probably be much faster in the pipeline. Currently there are just far too many MUST HAVE needs in the scoring department (Percussion staves for one).
I’m still very much in a state of using different Apps for different projects. Most of my Clients tell me what format they want a product delivered in, so I’m all over the map…using Sibelius, Finale, CuBase, etc. As much I like Dorico so far…I think it will be a bit of time yet before it becomes a mainstream format (at least in my neck of the woods). I personally intend to use it as much as possible when Clients only require printed or pre-rasterized materials (love the look of the engraving, and how easy it is to get there), but when it comes to delivering ‘working scores’, I’ve little choice but to keep delivering those in Finale, Sibelius, or MuseScore formats (each client has their preference). So far I’ve yet to have clients demand Lilypond projects.