Yeah, this question is very relevant to musicians that want to work with notation rather than piano roll. Notation carries much more information, and is much more understandable to read than piano roll. It's funny that piano roll still requires all the rhythm notations of score editing but leaves out the pitch and all the expression and articulation stuff. I can't write sophisticated music in a piano roll. You can't read what you write there. It's like converting handwriting into binary.
Personally, I use Reaper right now, but I hate the score editor. It seems deliberately stupid and unintuitive. And yet it's better than most because it's bugs are less crippling. It was not written by a musician and no musician had any design input. The problem is that Reaper has so many other things that I like about it. The score editor has a lot of power, but no grace.
Overture 5 looks like something to consider, but I'm skeptical that it will have everything I need. I'd be shocked if it does, because I've never even heard of it until now.
I've tried using Dorico and I think it's great, but it just doesn't have the DAW features and productivity that I need as well. But I think they may be taking Cubase over to incorporate into it.
I've also seriously tried Studio One which has a good score editor now and also interacts with Notion 6. But the score editor looks great but doesn't have a full set of features yet. (hard to move notes or change length, can't step input triplets) and it also has bugs that stop you completely from accomplishing what you want. They may be upgrading that in the future though. The integration with Notion is hard to get going and clunky. You might as well just save midi files and import them. Notion started showing bugs and weaknesses as soon as I started to work with it.
I tried Cubase too and that whole environment was too clunky for me.
Bitwig is great but it has no score editor
So I still haven't found a DAW with a good score editor. In my opinion, the one who gets that done right will have a great product that professionals will use more than other DAWs.
