No one knows, for how long this forum will survive.

There is also another Finale Forum, not supported by MakeMusic:

https://www.finaleforum.com/index.php?sid=597c1538ace5e5df1c0c2f1f0020a3ab 

But, also, no one knows how long that forum will survive.

What Peter says. MakeMusic owns this space and will do with it what they want and when. There was an older official forum and MakeMusic shut that one down completely when they started this one.

Like most regulars, I don’t come around much anymore. This new requirement to accept cookies every time one does anything is particularly annoying.

Agree. I'm surprised there is much traffic here at all, and it's clearly dwindled. I suspect the same is true for the other (unofficial) Finale Forum that Peter mentioned in which many of us also have participated over the years. I do occasionally peruse both forums but it's pretty sedate. The Dorico forum is very heavily trafficked and I was aware of that for some time before I switched to Dorico; they have a very active community, and that's clear regardless of one's opinion of Dorico. I'm already writing my sixth work in Dorico and it's much smoother than the previous four since Sept. I do worry about losing access, someday, to my large number of Finale scores (I had to tweak one or two of them recently). Just for kicks, I tried to import one work from a few years ago into Dorico vis mXML and it was a mess. So for me, export and import is not going to be feasible. I suspect there will be a way to keep going down the road; I mean, if Doom and Marathon are still available on the Mac and iOS, I suspect there may be ways for Finale to work if needed, but I'm being optimistic.

I'm not worried about losing access to any of my work. If necessary, I'll keep a Mac laptop around made between 2012–2025 (that might include 2026 but we won't know about that till October 2025). I've already built a portable drive that can run Finale on any Mac made in that time span—just have to spend the time making the instructions foolproof as it is not intuitive. 

Many of the announced upcoming changes in Dorico involve better compatibility with Finale via MusicXML. I notice that Michael Good is posting over at the Dorico forums more so this is encouraging. I'd be surprised if he got back in the saddle so soon after his retirement last year, however, but it's something to watch.

Muse Group met with me at NAMM in January. Their stated goal with MuseScore 5 and its new AI component is to make it so good and easy that it will eclipse Dorico & Sibelius while causing Finale users to flock in droves. It will still be be free. Ok... talk is cheap but they did go on a hiring bender in 2024 to make this happen. We'll see... If all that Russian money can't get their Cypress based act together to make Finale imports painless, then it's no better than the situation as it stands. One thing to make MS-5 the de facto notation app for the largest sheet music publisher in the world but quite another to make people actually use it. They still pay lip service to the open-source crowd but that model is dead. Expect MG to get closer to Elaine Gould a lá Dorico. This will make longtime MS users unhappy but will go a long way towards acceptance by the rest of us and cut way down on the numbers of horrible scores posted on their user web site. 

I had the experience of adapting a choral work and adding string parts for a performance over Easter Week. Normally, I don't bother scanning but this time, I wondered if that might save me some time. What a mistake! The notes scanned in perfectly but the other arranger did a few lazy layout tricks with lyrics and expressions plus used dotted slurs that scanned in as slurs adding many hours of work to fix in Finale.

Otherwise, I'll be munching popcorn waiting to see what happens.