Dorico is a really fantastic piece of software. Lilypond is great for engraving but pretty bad for composing. Sibelius is great for composing but I never liked

Dorico is a really fantastic piece of software. Lilypond is great for engraving but pretty bad for composing. Sibelius is great for composing but I never liked engraving in it. Dorico is a happy medium, in that it separates the composing workflow from the engraving workflow. They use different interfaces, because they are different tasks. Don't use finale. I did professional engraving in it (for works that were composed using it), and it is a broken buggy nightmare. IIRC, one of my then-employer's clients sued the company that maintains it, because opening a file in a later version of Final resulted in carefully-placed dynamics, text, and articulations moving to different locations. Dozens of hours of lost work.