This is a key insight. One of the things which has most endeared Dorico to me is that it’s the only program in the space which even seems to have had the right

This is a key insight. One of the things which has most endeared Dorico to me is that it’s the only program in the space which even seems to have had the right approach for this to be possible. They’ve taken the view, from the very outset, that the fundamentals of music are pitch and duration. Everything else we do layers on top of that. By contrast, basically every (maybe actually every, other than perhaps LilyPond?) other program out there takes measures/bars as the starting point. It makes some sense given the historical development of those programs, but because Dorico puts pitch and duration at the core of the program, operations which are extremely-annoying-to-impossible in other programs become trivial. If we were going to come up with the equivalent of a compiler IR, I suspect it would have to start with that insight. Critically, that insight also works for non-Western music, whereas the bars/measures-first approach encodes a lot of assumptions about the Western musical tradition, and the pre-20th century Western musical tradition to boot! Now: that’s mostly what I write, so I got by just fine with Sibelius for a long time, and StaffPad still does fairly well for me in many scenarios. But Dorico’s model is… better. Deeply better. I hope the other programs figure out how to switch to it over the next decade(s).