Inconsistent spacing of articulations
See figures. I rarely see published scores with accents embedded in the staves, so the current solution is to specify Above staff/Below staff for each one. (I think it would make more sense to specify direction as auto/above/below, and anchor as auto/chord/staff, but that's a separate issue.)
The first image is default articulation spacing. The second is with all articulations' anchor points set to "Below staff". The third is a manual 1sp correction for accents, which looks to me like it should be the default position (at least for Above staff/Below staff). I suppose the actual distance from the staff should be adjustable, but none of the position options in the articulation style settings appear to have any effect on them.
For staccatos, they do appear to respond to the articulation distance setting, but only if the anchor is set to Above staff/Below staff, which is why they changed position in the second image.
I would expect the first and second images to line up perfectly for at least the first four notes, perhaps the first six. Consequently, the default (chord automatic) position of the F's accent is arguably too far away.
Comments
First one looks fine to me. I don't have my copy of Elaine Gould's "Behind Bars" handy, but I know it was consulted heavilty during this. See for instance #25466: Articulation positions erratic (line/space, upstem/downstem).
I see you did discuss having sforzatos always outside the staff, and it's fine that the default behavior is to allow them to be inside. The first image isn't wrong, but that's not what I want. I would like to set them to be outside. In my opinion, this should be a style setting, but the current options (Above staff/Below staff) force them all to one side. Anyway, as I said, that's a separate issue, and I created a feature request in the forums for this functionality.
So for now I can set just set them manually. Here's the real issue: setting the anchor to "Below staff" moves all of them much lower than necessary, as what happened in image 2. I would expect it to simply move all interior accents to a minimum distance from the staff, specified by the Staff Distance style option. This is the issue I'm describing here, that the accents are unnecessarily moved farther away upon specifying "Above staff" or "Below staff".
True. We don't really provide the sort of full fine-grained control that would be necessary to get exactly the defaults you prefer.
Right, but this issue is not about what I would like it to be by default - I mentioned that to state my rationale behind these manual changes in the first place. I apologize if I didn't make that clear.
Changing an articulation from "Chord Automatic" to "Below Staff" should not move the articulation if it's already below the staff.
Yes, but if that was the case, then the articulations that actually require Below Staff would not be positioned correctly. The settings work well for the articulations they are tuned work well with, but not necessarily if you try to change the defauts. That's what I meant. We'd need to provide finer grain control, so that allowing "below staff" or "above staff" to do what you wanbt for accent makrs didn't break fermatas. The code is actually full of special cases, and a good number of these settings are not even used except where the special cases do not apply.