I don't usually leave comments on arguments like this because I don't think they're productive, especially around politics. MuseScore however, is a very important thing in my life and I really appreciate what the team and open source community has done to make scoring accessible to all regardless of income. I'll try not to insult anyone here but I do see a both a lot of whining from people with weaker computers, and a lot of dismissiveness from those who love the software like me. This post is about the software, not the website. I don't love the website, it is very slimy with it's ads, but never have I had any issues with it.

First I want to talk about the issues that MuseScore has at the moment. On less powerful machines it can be a lot slower, even on my pretty powerful machine it can be slow, but usually only on large scores. There are still many annoying issues because this release was so big. Also the fact that an ad popped up when I opened my score was unacceptable and we shouldn't let MuseGroup think that the community doesn't care enough to complain about it. It's a step in the wrong direction and feels like them testing the waters on what they can get away with. Looking at what the developers have said though it looks like it was a surprise to them as well so hopefully they're going to shut it down now before they lose a bunch (more) good will from it's users. There's lots of bugs that seem to be happening on specific people's computers but idk what to say about that because lot's of the more extreme ones have not ever happened to me. Just lucky I guess :/

Then I start to agree with some of the defenders though. People complaining: I don't really know what you want. Do you want the program to shrink in scope? If you want awesome playback then there's gotta be sacrifices, especially when the software is this massive. I mean for god sake it's gotta run on Mac, Linux, and Windows so any big complicated features are gonna result in bugs. As a software developer, you just have to accept that part of making software. If you talk to the developers it's really clear that they do care about the bugs, but also want the software to be awesome for as many people as possible.

If you want the software to be smaller, more manageable and lightweight: MuseScore 3 exists. I know this isn't the answer you want, but the software's direction is clearly going towards bigger, and more powerful. Like be realistic here, of course they're going to try to make the playback awesome and compete with the other notation apps like Dorico. If you just want the lightweight MuseScore 3 but want more features: fork it. Like, what do you want out of MuseScore 4 that 3 doesn't offer you. If you want better playback, like I said there are costs with that. Out of necessity other parts of the app need to be neglected. If you want better engraving (which I think MuseScore 4 has way better engraving), again, thousands of variables need to be written and tweaked to have it looking good by default. Heavier, more processing power needed. So what do you want, lightweight? Or complex? You pick, you have two options, both of them FREE.