No, we’re not at odds on initial workflow choices.
When doing through composed music, I do 99% of the composition in a Score Editor as well. Which one I fire up first depends on the client, or collaborative group’s demands of course.
More often than not, I don’t even need a high quality mock-up. I’ll get the score playing the best I can in what comes natively with the target user’s system (typically using what comes with Dorico/Sibelius/Finale/MuseScore/Etc., in the case of Dorico perhaps with some of my own HALion SE vstsound additions that the user can just double click to install real quickly). It’s going to a conductor, or to an individual playing musician, who will decide how s/he wants to interpret and play it.
It’s pretty rare I pull it into the DAW until the score is done (or mostly done), and then only if extra/intensive sound shaping that I can’t do natively and efficiently in the initial workflow is required. In that case, I just save the slate of sounds required in each plugin, export the MIDI tracks, pull it all into the DAW, and get to work ‘sound shaping’.
As for those libraries with many gigs of ‘sample choices’…no, those don’t really cut it for me in any out of the box ‘automated’ form yet. I’ve looked into building some of my own expression maps for nice libraries, and there are just too many variations required across different scores/tempos/etc. to have a single plug and play map. No scoring package on the market sends the information required to the plugins yet (time signature, tempo, key signature, etc.) to script up a library that can decide on its own to shift tuning schemes on a key change, if it should pick martele, or sautellie based on the marks on the score…and it takes all kind of time to poke them into a score manually, or sort out the logic in expression maps on a score by score basis to get it right…force overrides…etc. Spreading it out in a tracking DAW, in contrast, make it pretty simple…and there is visual order to the game plan. And don’t get me started on the nightmare of dealing with legato phrases via expression maps.
Interestingly enough, HALion 6 has the capabilities to build some very smart instruments that could get a lot of this correct on the fly, and in real time…but the signals the plugin needs to get that information aren’t hooked up yet in any premier scoring package I know of.
With the monster libraries that have a fresh sample for every attack and release style…One still has to relentlessly audition all the options, and manually plug them into expression maps. Few of them are the correct length for contexts, and they don’t include a standard for time stretching/shrinking them in real time. They STILL require tweaks (often even outright resampling them, and pasting the results into the mix on an audio track). They are still tempo/style dependent. They still need micro slides on the time-line to fit the chosen virtual room and seating arrangement (plus to offset cancellation effects inherent in sampled music and loud speakers), and often even require quite a bit of custom tuning throughout the passages. They still require user intervention for sound staging and ‘mixing’.
Cause and effect variations relative to a group of performing musicians aren’t just ‘random’. There are physiological, and physical reasons for them. Instruments respond to temperature, pressure, etc…and musicians adjust as they play. Different instruments have specific tuning characteristics that are important to address in a high quality mock-up.
Most of these things ARE POSSIBLE to achieve in Dorico, but with a lot more time consuming manual labor at this time. It’s labor intensive in the tracking DAW as well; however, the DAW has tools to automate redundant sound shaping tasks, and build up a personal library of macros/presets/etc, to brush up and reshape every aspect of the virtual ‘performance’…from almost any level from the point a sound is generated to the point it hits the speakers…all spread out over as many monitors as you can afford to plug into the PC. In the DAW, we stop being a composer/musician, and shift into the role of the audio engineer. That’s the point where at this time, it’s still a major time saver to move the project into sound engineering software.