As you might suspect I have no interest.

Yeah me neither. One former Finale user (with whom I dimly recall sparring at times on the old Finale forum and who was very arrogant back then about how great Finale was if I remember correctly) was very dismissive and said that we are all victims of Stockholm syndrome. Pretty rude if you ask me.

But I also think MM needs to take notice. Why are people leaving for Dorico? (note: Sibelius has a huge problem with this as well). I think it's more than just Dorico being the new hotness; it reflects longstanding dissatisfaction with a lack of consistent communication with MM developers, neglect of longtime users like the two of us and many others here, little or no innovation, persistent bugs and lack of functionality despite multiple requests from all of us, etc. I personally could care less about whether or not Dorico's standard font more resembles some ancient copyist practice than Maestro (which is irrelevant these days when I can change to any font I want, including SMuFL), or if Dorico observes certain arcane copyist practices. As a composer, I'm more concerned with being able to actually notate what I come up with, and have reasonable playback (GPO5 and NotePerformer, sometimes supplemented by Reason for sequencing and certain sound files, has worked well). That's why I chose Finale in the first place back in the v 3.2 days (I still have Pogue's hardcopy manuals in the boxed set; those were the days). Finale is still very versatile, but it remains laborious, and most times I start writing a new piece I always find surprises, and those surprises are not good ones. My last work, a long piano work so not terribly complicated, was noteworthy for Finale suddenly crashing at random times when I would be using the Selection tool to copy some music into another measure. It didn't always happen but when it did it was instantaneous and I had to redo stuff until I just started hitting Cmd-S after everything I did. That was not something I'd had to do before; Finale was generally stable. Other times playback was messed up, or certain operations didn't work right, etc. It was as if Finale decided to do whatever it could to make my notation and/or playback way more problematic than it should have been. That said, the software does work in the end once it puts me through hell. I swear it's possessed.

...Dorico (I think for some it’s a cult)

I agree!  I think Dorico is not ready for prime time..............yet!

I still come back to the one of two, or perhaps both, reasons why MM doesn't do certain things. MM doesn't know how to or they don't have the money to.

In their defence, I am sure some bugs may, might, have negative results on other working parts of Finale so a cautious approach might be prudent. However, again enforcing the, "MM doesn't know how to," reasoning.  And, then the part of it costing a great deal of money!

MM doesn't know how to or they don't have the money to.

Yes I've seen you say this multiple times on this and the user-based Finale forum ;-)

I'm not sure it's that they don't know how to. And business-wise, they certainly know that many of these improvements are mission-critical to avoid further loss of their user base, so it's not so much a matter of money (they know they need to spend it to continue to make money in a capitalist society like ours) but priorities. I think they felt that the SMuFL thing was critical to keep Finale relevant. Maybe, sure. But that's not exactly the major feature that would keep someone like me very engaged. Reason has made the same mistake; no compelling reason (no pun intended) to upgrade from v 10 to v 12, and worse, they significantly upped the price. Gonifs. At least MM hasn't done that.

Doesn't matter if Dorico is awesome or not or if it lacks features some of us need. They have momentum, a very engaged and passionate user base (cult-like in fact), good developers and very importantly, responsive developers. Yes, it sounds like when you engage with them you have to justify why you need a particular enhancement. But that's not unreasonable, TBH. The lack of responsiveness by MM, and no clear interactive channels to get there (like how this forum should be), is not helpful. Even if Dorico lacks certain things, there is a general belief that they will at least consider adding them and in many cases, they do add them. I've sent multiple lists over the years to MM about what I'd love to see improved or added; the silence has lasted longer than 4'33"