[organsnyder]

> I basically throw away everything in the generated .ly files except the notes. But saves a lot of effort regardless.

That seems like a good workflow to me for the Musescore→LilyPond direction, and speaks to the incompatibility in approaches that make a more seamless integration less likely: LilyPond, as a typesetting engine, is essentially incompatible with a WYSIWYG workflow.

I did a bunch of engraving (probably around 100 works) when I ran a music publishing business. Many of the scores were organ and/or choral works, which are quite complex to engrave (especially compared to solo instrumental pieces). My workflow was to get the notes, words, articulations, etc. into LilyPond with no formatting tweaks, see what it gave me, and then tweak from there. But the defaults provided by the engine were almost always a very good starting point.

I would think that the other direction would be much easier, though, since that's basically the same workflow as copying plain text into Microsoft Word (albeit music notation is more complex than plain text).