Playback comparison across Staffpad, Dorico + NP, Dorico + BBC Discover, and Musescore 4

This is the score video of a piece created for Ryan Leach's October prompt (linked below)
Playback from the following are shown in the same order
Staffpad + Libraries from OT Berlin (woodwinds, brass), Cinesamples Perc and Harp, Spitfire (chamber strings  and Flute)
Dorico and Noteperformer
Dorico and Spitfire BBC Discover (just loaded template, no tweaks from Noteperformer setup)
Musescore 4 + Muse sounds (Beta version)

Thanks to ‪@RyanLeach‬  for his prompt
Our Biggest Composing Competition Yet!

Artwork by Andy Walsh
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DlnRe

I am not sponsored by any of the companies below for saying nice things about them (or to criticize their competitors ;) so this is just my honest opinion.

‪@StaffPadOfficial‬  has the advantage because the work was composed there and sounds closest to intention. It works out of the box 95% with just minor quirks in terms of balance and round robin sample issues. This is the best tool to get the composition work done. It is terrible at score preparation (no condensing, accidentals checking, auto fixing tuplets), exporting stems (if you want dry stems without reverb, you have to zero it out for every single staff manually), music xml export (sometimes exports unreadable elements in xml file that fail validation),  being accurate about instrument's capabilities (can play out of range notes even on the sampled libraries... somehow!).

It took some work to import xml from Staffpad to ‪@dorico‬  (harp pedals, trill details, bisbigliandos etc. go missing). But once you are past that, preparing score on Dorico was enjoyable. The Condense/Explode options are great. Instrument auto assign was right most of the time and saved a ton of effort. Adding back harp pedals, trills , and cleaning up dynamics was easy. It warns you about hard to play notes and out of range notes so that's good. The software GUI is well designed for score preparation but I personally find Staffpad more convenient for composing. Dorico also needs to add some safety nets in score preparation. For example on a score without key signature, it failed to warn me about not printing harp pedals by default (and I ended up with C major glissandos on my score). Frame breaks weren't intuitive. You can do it wrong and end up missing a page of score without warning.

When it came to Dorico playback, it appears to lack Portamentos and  bisbigliando (or atleast it wasn't obvious to me).  With Noteperformer, enough has been said about its balance and accuracy. It's not a sample library so timbrally its not as pleasing, but the Brass section playback is astonishingly good. Harps and Woodwinds are fine and acceptable. Strings are terrible (I wish that can be improved). Some of the trills on strings were simply unacceptable and I dont know if Dorico is to blame or NP.  Having said that, NP mockup is effortless. I suspect that for more complex scores with fast runs on woodwinds and involved Brass passages , NP will outshine Staffpad.

Spitfire BBC Discover is at some disadvantage here because its the free version , and I am just using the Dorico's BBC template out of the box. You can notice that the strings, although they sound fine,  pretty much drown out rest of the orchestra throughout the piece. I suspect that with some work, this can be made to sound better , but that's exactly the kind of work a composer shouldn't be wasting time with :)

Musescore 4 + Musesounds seems very promising for something totally free (and hey, they acquired Staffpad so we can expect some of that goodness to crossover)
It is at a disadvantage here as well because this was just the xml imported over from Dorico (which is, once again, missing harp pedals along with several other playing technique notations). I didn't spend time cleaning up the score like I did in Dorico . Being Beta version, there are bound to be bugs and quirks in playback (as you can tell from the SUPER loud Flute Flutter at the beginning). Sustains are played back well, but once things speedup, you can hear the machine gun sample effect (or other weird artifacts). It does take more work assigning instruments (they should steal the feature from Dorico). Unlike in Dorico, its not intuitive to me atleast how you can condense the score AND retain proper playback when switching from divisi to tutti for instance, so that's another area that must be improved upon. They do share features like warning about out of range notes (and a ton of more checking/analysis plugins)