[jancsika]

> As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors

tldr; Lilypond needs to compile a perfect engraving. If it does then you get a great looking score for the least effort. If it doesn't then you'll likely eat all your time tweaking. This makes it good for single instrument parts, not so good for more complex scores.

It's at least an order of magnitude more difficult to tweak anything in Lilypond than it is with a WYSIWYG editor.

Moreover, with WYSIWYG you can take a 30 minute class offered by an expert who will show you how to change the defaults to get a decent-looking score. Even moreover, that expert could literally sit in front of your laptop and drag an indication to a better spot to teach you something about whitespace/alignment/etc.

If you can figure out how to make a small tweak to a Lilypond score in less than 10 minutes you're doing well. And you'll probably have to recompile at least twice since you'll estimate the distance of the tweak wrong, especially if you're a new user. For each tweak.

Oh, and recompilation time scales with score length. Good luck changing the position of an indication in the last bar right before a deadline. I think I'd rather track down an XHTML error in a tax form than do that.