Another thing that occurred to me is it can be very helpful to first compose in notation like Finale or Sibelius because converting that into MIDI is fairly easy. However, if you have something that was composed first playing into a keyboard, especially with a lot of different tracks, it can be a nightmare converting that into notation. I've had to do that on a lot of stuff that I deliberately did with loose performance accuracy in order to make it sound more human, but then I wanted a notated score. That of course requires quantizing and no program does that perfectly, so it becomes a huge editing hassle to get everything accurate for conversion to notation. It is interesting how the humanize features of VSL have become so good that having a perfect sheet music quantized MIDI sequence works very well without a mechanical feel. So now it makes sense to have a notated score to begin with if you ever plan to convert it into sheet music.
Yes, my experience exactly! It is easy to export MIDI from Sibelius or Finale into a DAW, which gives a great starting point for the midi-performance. One still has a lot of work left to do, but it isn't too onerous to select articulations and paint CC curves for dynamics and other controls like start and release. Once again this is another area of VSL advantage because as you point out, the VSL humanization features obfuscate the need to manually humanize note start times and tuning variations.
My limited experience with going from MIDI to notation also matches yours. This became painfully clear to me a few weeks ago when I was trying to create notation from a MIDI file created by another composer. The midi sounded great, but it was so sloppy that it took forever to get it notated.
As we discuss these VSL advantages, it really makes me wonder about the folks on the VI-Control forum who seem to hate the VSL instruments. I wonder if they simply do not think like classically trained musicians? For so many the only consideration seems to be "out of the box" initial impression of the sound.