Change Instrument text doesn't stick on repeat

>> the focus of development is mainly on notation, with playback being more secondary in priority.

With all due respect, Marc, I find that a false dichotomy. My compositional process -- and I'm sure this is true for many if not most composers -- involves continually hearing and re-hearing what I'm working on (right in the software). The notation and the rendering are inextricably interwoven.

When I was a software developer, one thing I learned early and learned well was that redundant sections or snippets of code were anathema. They are accidents waiting to happen. You clone a snippet, paste it somewhere else, maybe even modify it a bit; then later, almost inevitably, you find a way to improve the original snippet. Do you remember to change the copies and near copies? Do you even remember how many there are, and where they are? Do you know whether they are exact copies, or slightly modified copies? Do you remember what those slight modifications were?

It's a nightmare, and the same dynamic applies in musical scores. Copying an entire 16- or 32-bar section of music just so one can change an instrument, or add an instrument, or whatnot, is just a bad idea. Now you have to remember to make every change twice -- or three times, or four times, depending upon how many of those infernal copies you had to make. And you can't press forward with creative work, even when you're in a magnificent creative frenzy, hoping you'll remember to make the redundant changes later. Inevitably you'll miss some, and then teasing out the differences between the copies becomes a big job. Or, they jump out and bite you in the middle of a performance!

I write many kinds of music; but as a performer, I'm a guitarist, and am, more often than not, singing while playing. There are situations when I can turn a page during a song, but there are many more where I can't, so that economy in the score is extremely important. Three pages is the practical limit of what I can unfurl on a music stand, and I can't have notes and lyrics so small that I can't make them out in the less-than-optimally-lit situations that always come up. Unnecessary bloat in the score is a serious problem!

Making a second copy of a score -- one that doesn't play back correctly -- simply to achieve notational economy is another version of that deadly clone-and-modify strategy. How do I know when a piece is finished? Most of the things I write are never finished. The amount of tweaking becomes less and less over time, and approaches zero, but never reliably gets there.

So I say that in scoring music, as in writing software, things should be written for re-use whenever they can. In software, you add parameters to a routine to enable it to handle needs that vary slightly from use to use. In music scores, you can do the same thing by adding textual notes -- e.g., "2nd time only". But having one score for proper playback and a different score for economical notation? Not good!