Thank you for that informative explanation. What you do may indeed be the best way to work, in a perfect world. but that assumes one has the kind of mental focus to keep jumping back and forth. I for one don't. Like Jerry, I work on the sound end, using Sonar, and now Reaper, to give me the feedback I need with the orchestration. I use staff view (notation view in Reaper) heavily. Like Jerry, I also started out with pencil and paper. I then transferred to ink, going so far one time as to write out a cello sonata backwards. Being left-handed, and not having quick-dry ink, that's how I had to do it. Then I realized I could do it in pencil, and take it to Kinko's and turn up the dark setting all the way. Eventually, I got Cakewalk 6 way back in the 90's, and that's what I've been using until recently, when I decided to give Reaper a try. What impresses me about it is that the developers were able to create a notation feature in about 6 months. I am confident they will continue to improve it.
I guess I have a curious style of working, whereby I work in a DAW, but use it as if it were notation, in that what I do is tied to notes, but the sound capabilities of Sonar allowed me to really experiment with orchestration. I did experience frustration when I printed out Cakewalk's notation. I had to write in a bunch of stuff by hand. but being a hobbyist, I was only interested in getting something that captured what I had done on paper. I could send it to the copyright office, for example. And if I lost all my electronic work, I would at least have that. I have been revising much of my work since retiring, and wanted to produce decent scores, so I bought Notion. Again, I'm not interested in perfect engraving-quality results, but definitely something better than Sonar. I guess I'm somewhere in between You and Jerry. I really only am trying to please myself, so I can cut corners, so to speak.
Perhaps we come to do music the way we do it, as a result of the products we use, and we evolve a work flow out of that. If, when I began doing computer music in the late 90's, and there had been something like Dorico around, I might now have that iterative work flow you describe. But I only had Cakewalk 6, so I am where I am. I agree with Jerry that Sonar's staff view is adequate for those who use it as an aid to composing. He is correct about the need for infinite scrolling. When Reaper was developing their notation, I emphasized the importance of this, and they listened. It's a bit more cumbersome than Sonar's, but then it allows you to add fermatas, dots, and so on, so it is already much more evolved than Sonar's. And I'm sure it will only get better. And learning a new DAW has the added bonus of exercising my aging brain and maybe holding off the dreaded disintegration we all fear.
Oh well, enough rambling. Interesting conversation, though. It's made me think about how I do what I do, and whether there could be a better way. Time will tell.