One thing I am not clear about. Your Presonus example showed recording some of the MIDI into StudioOne. It isn't clear to me what happens if I record a few measures of MIDI and then modify the MIDI within the DAW. When I go to play back that measure, will I now hear TWO copies of MIDI for those measures (the original from Notion and the copy I hacked on in StidioOne?) ideally I'd like to hear the Notion MIDI except for the measures I have saved in StudioOne. Do you think there is some option for the DAW MIDI to override the Notion MIDI when both sources are present, much like take lanes?

 
In the case where the notation program is sending midi to a track that already has midi recorded on it, I would expect that Sonar would behave the same as it would if you had a track selected by your keyboard controller that has midi on it. That is, you would hear both. Not the ideal I think.
 
I think this setup is too wonky for me. Hopefully we'll see a few updates to notation inside Sonar. That would be the best option for me.                        

It is possible to send midi directly to SONAR from Finale using LoopBe1. At least, I did it using Finale Notepad and LoopBe1 a weeks or so ago but did not think much of it. I would imagine it would work with an notation tool. I performed the test after reading this thread http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/2786282

I really like and support the concise list of fixes proposed by Jerry in the first post of this thread.  Great post.
 
I also would prefer to have back the option of the note length icons.  I use the notation feature in SONAR for edits and for composition, but as I do this infrequently, I would rather not have to learn key bindings (much as I realize this would be more efficient for regular users).  Please give us back the note icons, but if you can, make them hide-able for those who do not need them.
 
Thank you all!  It's very heartening to see progress on this issue.
 

To use note icons now, run Duckbar (register to download). It adds note icons to the staff view without modifying any SONAR files: