Outside of virtual machines and keeping increasingly 'vintage' hardware running: yes, Finale will become unusable. The floodwaters of progress will keep rising. Apple is 'fair, but ruthless', when ...
Your installed copy of Finale will continue to run, as long as the hardware runs. (OS updates nothwithstanding.) The Authorization servers are only needed when you reinstall on a clean disk or a ne...
You could buy Dorico Elements, which is the "cut-down", cheaper version. That's normally $99, though there is currently a 50% sale on all Steinberg products. However, while the Pro version certain...
Making sure our content can continue in some way is of course now the most critical thing. Yes, you should make PDFs of everything. (I usually do this, as it ensures that nothing "moves" when I op...
This just isn't possible for a whole load of technical and practical reasons. If you think MM could do this, then they could equally write their own brand new app that could open Finale files flawl...
If you're using the Garritan JABB/COMB instruments, then you can keep using them.
ARIA Player works perfectly well in Dorico. The VST3 plug-ins load in automatically -- no whitelisting needed (that had to be done in version 2 years ago.)
TBH, I would just get Noteperformer now. ;-)
Word seems to support SMuFL fonts on my Mac (Sonoma 14.5). As far as Word knows, it's just an OTF font with glyphs in the Private Unicode Area: there's no reason why it wouldn't support it. Finale ...
If the installer for Finale left you with no actual copy of Finale, then I suggest you raise a support request directly with MakeMusic, for them to figure out what's going on on your system.