Really interesting. I was thinking about language in general just yesterday. In English, we put the adjective first, then the noun. In French, the noun is first and then the adjective. The white house, the house white. So in music we might have the flat B, or the B flat. Looking at printed music, we indeed visually see the flat B when scanning horizontally from left to right. This has me wondering about languages that read from right to left, is their music also written in reverse? I digress into ignorance.

So your step-entry decision is to go with what is visually seen on the page, and to avoid hearing the wrong thing before hearing the right thing. When reading, I disagreed with you until I thought about things in the way I have written so far.

Your mention of bar lines also caught my notice. I am so very annoyed with scoring applications automatically giving you a number of bars to work with at the outset, with a double bar at the end, and great initial confusion as to how to change that number of bars while entering notes. I would much rather have no bar lines at the beginning and add them as I progress. I would also like to be able to enter too many notes into a measure and then split that measure, assuming I'm adding music into the middle of a score and have effectively added an extra measure in a free-form manner. The refusal of a scoring app to let me add too many notes into a measure infuriates me. Ideally, such rigid behavior should be able to be toggled on and off, along with a feature to check for mistakes in rhythmic measure length.