There is a balance between ‘doing things properly’ and maintaining flexibility. When it comes to layout, Dorico’s superior flexibility makes certain things complicated, but what else would you expect from a pro application? For ‘simple’ use, I do believe a lot of the default settings gives most people an acceptable result without any tweaking. For ‘advanced’ use, the possibilities are endless as long as you learn the more complicated stuff.
In Adobe the master page moves with the page itself, and I would have expected that to be true of Dorico too—but apparently not?
As Daniel explained here, “The reason you don’t see these anomalies in Adobe InDesign is because InDesign never automatically crates pages in order to make sure that all of the content that might be lurking in any of the chains of text frames in your document actually appears, whereas Dorico has to do this automatically”
Also, I never understood why flow titles, subtitles, dedication, lyricist, composer, arranger, and orchestrator text could not simply be integrated as part of a flow—not as first-measure items like > Sibullyus> , but simply anchored to the beginning of the flow under the hood so it prints above the first line (with proper controls for spacing, &c) on its own, without the need of text frames. This would allow the flows to, well, flow! within a single music frame on a page, making it simpler to achieve a great printable outcome without page overrides and template changes and what not.
I think this simplification would diminish the flexibility of layout in Dorico. Flows ≠ movements - they can be used in many creative ways where you never would want a title. If you haven’t seen it yet, have a look at this tutorial, which demonstrates some of the layout possibilities using flows. Text frames are an important part of this flexibility. I think that having some text within the text frames, and some floating around without would give far less control over the result (I’m not talking about music text such as tempo, playing techniques and etc, which has to be linked directly to the music).
I have some ideas/questions regarding this topic:
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Would it be possible to make ‘Allow on existing page’/‘Always start new page’ a per-flow specific option? I think this would enhance the ‘automatic flexibility’. I imagine it accessible through right-clicking the flow in setup mode. This would of course have to be subordinate the layout setting.
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Is there a reason why ‘Swap with next page’ doesn’t apply to master page changes? I have found that selecting multiple pages and using this feature works great for tidying up page overrides when the music length changes, so I think this would be a very handy feature for master page changes as well.