[mazelife]

You managed to perfectly put into words something I was trying to articulate in my own comment on this thread about the limitations I kept running into with open source notation tools as alternatives to Sibelius. They always felt like they traded control for simplicity, which ultimately made them feel like kind of a "toy" rather than a professional tool.

> I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set

I could not agree more. Correctly engraving music is hard! If someone wants to get a sense of all the things that a professional-grade tool would need to handle, Gardner Read's "Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice" is kind of the gold standard here. 453 pages that solely cover how to correctly notate music. I've been doing this for years and I still consult it fairly regularly.