Check out this article in the February 2016 eZine on a sophisticated orchestral work done with SONAR. This isn't to deflect criticism that the Staff View could be improved, but rather to show that some people are comfortable working in the existing Staff View.

I use the staff view all the time, learn its quirks and it is fine, though it could be improved.

I use staff view all the time and while it can sometimes be frustrating, so can Finale.
 
I would ignore that rest and just put the second half note where it goes.  If you need to, you can quantize and it will all straighten out.  Best of luck.

How are you entering the notes? I do it with a midi keyboard, using the step recorder. You set the note length and play the key. you need to reset the note length if the value changes. I never had any problems doing it like this, but that was with Sonar 8.5. I don't know if things have changed.

I would rather stick pins in my eyeballs than input notes in staff view. I find PRV very quick and intuitive for inputting and/or editing notes.

PRV?  That's a piano keyboard and notes displayed as lines?  I must admit that I haven't looked at it since I play violin, Cello and Double bass.  In addition, I have spent far too many years hearing the sound in my head just by looking at a score that I really couldn't write like that.  The material I compose requires parts for a full orchestra.
 
My routine used to be where I would sit at my desk with a pad of paper, write the parts, present them to the orchestra and then spend countless hours revising to "tidy up" the accents, the slurs, etc to make it work.  Then I came across a $20 notation program that did everything.  With simple computer key strokes you could insert slurs, double dotted notes up to 1/64, and anything else that could be hand-written on a page and this was a tiny program.
 
Lee, calling the inserting of notes in Sonar, a "Nightmare", was not an exaggeration.  Let's face it.  Cakewalk has moved away from traditional music towards a more electrified platform.  When I thought I had lost my password to this forum a verification of being human question was asked: "Starting with 'S' what is the technique used by DJs to move a record backwards and forwards."  (Or something like that).  Obviously, Cakewalk doesn't expect too many 70 year-old Cellists.   You can insert guitar nomenclature into the staff view but not slurs, glissando, grace notes, double dotted notes or hemidemisemiquavers.  Not only that, but the entire process appears to be almost deliberately laborious.  And, I really don't understand why Sonar has a Staff view that is so backwards when my $20, 15 Mb notation program does everything I've mentioned with ease.  It's drawback is that it uses windows sounds which butcher anything I write.  While I can export files as midi from it and import them into Sonar I get corruption and driver issues when I do.  I bought Sibelius but when I launch it I get a BSOD and find my self in a support vacuum.  So I soldier on with Sonar using the eraser tool far more than I should.
 
I first used Cakewalk with Windows 95 when it was first launched back in the mid 90s and its staff view features were far superior to what they are now.  You could actually see all the tracks at once in notation form.  Editing was intuitive and straight-forward and allowed simultaneous editing of tracks as if you were altering a score.  That's why I came back to Cakewalk.  I love rock, some techno and trance but was creating a nightmarish experience writing music notation when Cakewalk had already charted these waters, a step forward?  I do appreciate the help that this community has given me - I certainly need it but that doesn't mean I can ignore what's obvious.
 
Thank you.  I realize this was long but there were many responses.   
 
 

If you really prefer writing by entering notation and do mostly orchestral stuff, Sonar is simply a bad fit for you. Sibelius would be much better. I don't know what you mean by a support vacuum, you get a year of support when you buy it. If you get a BSOD on opening it I'm assuming you really tried removing it and reinstalling? And your AVID license center is running?

djwolf
Lee, calling the inserting of notes in Sonar, a "Nightmare", was not an exaggeration.  

Well to be fair, yes it is an exaggeration, or at the very least its very inaccurate. If Lee had said inserting notes into the notation view of Sonar is a nightmare, that would be accurate. But inserting notes into Sonar is about as easy as falling off a log so long as you're doing it the way the designers intended it to be done. 
 
Its always seemed to me that the Sonar staff view was meant to be primarily an output tool rather than a composition or editing tool. As others said, if you want to do composition in notation view, Sonar really isn't a good fit for you.

djwolf
PRV?  That's a piano keyboard and notes displayed as lines?  I must admit that I haven't looked at it since I play violin, Cello and Double bass.  In addition, I have spent far too many years hearing the sound in my head just by looking at a score that I really couldn't write like that.  The material I compose requires parts for a full orchestra.

I agree that Sonar isn't the ideal tool for that kind of work. I'm not sure that any of the modern DAWs are, they're based around recording audio and MIDI, performance capturing and ways of working that generally aren't creating orchestral scores with complete expression marks, bowing instructions, transposing instruments etc. And where they can cope with orchestral scoring the design intention is often geared to enabling production of a mixed and processed audio file of the work rather than printed sheets to give to musicians.

The PRV approach is very flexible, and anyone who understands even a bit of musical theory can usually work out how to use one in little time, and it makes inserting or editing things like MIDI continuous controllers easier than in a score view. It also does away with the need for ledger lines and familiarity with clefs, which is useful for many people.

But if you need to produce a score, don't need to then turn that score into, for example, a believable orchestral performance using sampled instruments but need printed output for musicians to read then it's perfectly fine to decide it's not the easiest or best road to get to where you want to be. Because it isn't.

Sibelius really does seem the obvious choice for the job you do, if you can sort out whatever's causing the crash problem.

Sanderxpander
If you really prefer writing by entering notation and do mostly orchestral stuff, Sonar is simply a bad fit for you.

I think Sanderxpander hit it on the head.  Like you, djwolf. I wish SONAR did staff view better than it does, but the truth is it doesn't.  In the end, I guess we can't expect every program to do everything that we want and need.