Finale Top Ten Tips & Tricks Video at Groove3

I'm learning Finale 2012 at the minute and I have to say: my God what a badly designed program. It just seems to have a completely convoluted and counter intuitive way of doing things. I get the feeling that it's an OLD program which has had new stuff clumsily tacked onto it over the years. It's the Quickbooks of notation software. I'm interested to see how Steinberg's upcoming notation program turns out.

You mean Finale 2014 is a great improvement over 2012? I looked into the possibility of upgrading but after reading many reviews it seems that a lot of people don't think that it's gotten much better at all. One of the things that really bothers me about the program is that it forces my interface into 44.1kHz, when I run my system audio at 48kHz (and work that way in Sonar). Apparently this hasn't changed in 2014. And I've never been able to get it to accept MIDI input without huge latency, which makes keyboard input almost impossible. 
 
And it's little things like not allowing playback start/stop with the space bar, despite this being standard for playback in most audio and video software. Click + Space to start playback? Click to stop playback? Horrible! I also find the way the options and function dialogs are organized to be horribly counter intuitive as well. It's one of those programs that gives you the feeling that it was developed without much consideration to how people expect programs to work (i.e. design standards). When I learn an Adobe program like Illustrator or Premiere, everything makes sense and I can feel my way around the program intuitively with just a few general pointers. Ditto with Sonar, Pro Tools and most other audio software I've used. Finale, not so much. 
 
This is why I'm so eager to see how Steinberg's scoring software turns out. From reading bits of the development blog it seems like they're really putting a lot of thought into usability and good design. 

Thanks BD.  I'll check it out.