I used Finale in the last year of high school (roughly), 1999. On PowerPC macs with MacOS 8 or 9. It was unbelievably bad. The UI was absolutely terrible - it had a huge photoshop/paint-like "drawing tools" palette, but what was in this palette changed depending on other things. Exotic things like resizing note heads or stems were easy. Basic things like a pickup beat you would never, ever figure out how to do correctly on your own.
The developers had also given up trying to get rendering to work correctly. They had a "rerender the whole UI from scratch" menu option for when the rendering inevitably messed up horribly.
It also crashed a lot.
It may honestly have been a factor in me deciding that I could do better in programming than in music, because I felt like even I could do better than that.
I have heard musician friends claim it got better in later years, but I don't quite trust it, since I know what musicians put up with in terms of awkward user interfaces.
The developers had also given up trying to get rendering to work correctly. They had a "rerender the whole UI from scratch" menu option for when the rendering inevitably messed up horribly.
It also crashed a lot.
It may honestly have been a factor in me deciding that I could do better in programming than in music, because I felt like even I could do better than that.
I have heard musician friends claim it got better in later years, but I don't quite trust it, since I know what musicians put up with in terms of awkward user interfaces.
So, good riddance.