Originally Posted by: lunar_28664 
Overture was the first with full VST playback support to my knowledge and for that reason I was happy to support it for a time. As you say, the bugs and instability are probably the biggest issue these days.
All true. The main problem with it is that its developed by a lone-developer...and its rather a large project for such a small team. Considering its a one-man effort, its quite incredible what all it can do, but nonetheless, it will simply never, in my view, get the polish and effort that Notion and Dorico get...especially Dorico since the old Sibelius team is working very actively on it. I am actually happy to contribute money to Dorico just to further the cause of seeing it developed......but Steinberg imposes a fairly hefty upgrade schedule...FWIW..so the cost of Dorico is definitely considerably more.
I used Overture4 on a student film scoring project (with live orch), some years ago and got many compliments from other students about how great my scores looked compared to the scores they had done with Sibelius and Finale. It just produced wonderful looking score without me having to fiddle with much..the default settings were right. The downside was that during part extraction...I ended up with some part errors in the recording session that I didn't catch...and I feel like I spent more time nudging things around to make it all work also. But overall, at the time, the thought of trying to learn Finale or Sibelius (neither of which I was knowledgable about) was totally overwhelming and Overture4 was just relatively easy to get going, get the notes in and output really nice looking scores without having to change my layouts or other deep parameters to make it look the best. For that particular task it was perfect for the job without me having to learn Finale..which positively overwhelmed me at the thought of having to do.
Don is an interesting character. Sometimes he gets mad if you point out problems, other times he reaches out with personal email to help you out. Years ago I asked about adding large time sigs with with vertical lines, etc.. for film scoring work and he promptly added a new feature, which is still there today, called "Hollywood Lines" and its a cool feature actually.
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And of course Notion was always known for its innovative (at the time) playback features -- just thought it would worth mentioning the relatively weak typesetting for someone considering an all-in-one.
Yes well not only does Notion have its built in sounds...which 10-15 years ago were ground breaking perhaps, but today with VST playback....there are better sounds...but nonetheless it has a deep system for configuring playback that most people are not even aware of and hardly anyone has really put to good use. It has a scripting language that can be used to create playback rules that exceed what can be done with Dorico's expression Maps, for example. I was hoping Presonus would adopt that into StudioOne5, but they didn't unfortunately. There is hardly any documentation about Notion's built in scripting language for configuring playback, but its very capable of some advanced things and is a hidden secret in Notion.
You can read a bit about it in a few places, its been a while since I look at it, but here's one link:
https://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/articles/210049153-Custom-Rules-GUI-for-Notion-5-and-6
I agree though, its typeset is barely good enough for anything other then maybe your local church choir, and maybe not even that.
Its also VERY easy to enter music and get it formatted the way you want...so its very quick to learn, easy to use, and has a killer hidden playback engine...and syncs with StudioOne, etc.. But...its typeset, forget about it. If I were going to put pages in front of anyone other then my mom, I would almost certainly export the MusicXML and finish the score work in something else.