I'm still very interested to hear about people's workflows.
But I'm also happy to rant about this, since you asked for more clarification. =) If you have suggestions, please let me know!
Instant preview:
In FL Studio, alt + right-click will display a vertical line located at the mouse cursor. Any notes that intersect that vertical time position will be triggered. When dragging the mouse to another point in time, the piano roll will send the appropriate note-off / note-on signals. It is an incredibly fast way to spot-check chords, note velocities, and articulations (including legato as I scrub between notes) when editing. One important example is while orchestrating, I would be spreading a chord across different MIDI parts. in FL Studio it is possible to trigger midi notes of all midi parts simultaneously. So I can instantly hear how the note fits in with all the other instruments.
In Cubase, there is a "scrub" tool. It only produces a short note and does not sustain, it is distractingly laggy, and scrubbing backwards doesn't seem to work properly. Worse, it only works on one part at a time, and such a tool does not evem exist at all in the normal key editor. It is possible to ctrl-click notes to hear nearby notes, but if some notes start just slightly too early or late, they won't be played. Using transport controls is the only practical option, but that's still slow compared to what I was accustomed to.
Warping groups of notes:
In FL Studio it is possible to select a group of notes and stretch/shrink them proportionally. One example where I use this is to implement realistic runs that fit in a rhythm. Another example is doubling a passage in multiple instruments, and emulating their inaccuracy in various places. Squeezing and stretching various groups of notes is more convincing than just shifting an entire part.
So far, I have not been able to coax Cubase's logical editor to implement this correctly. There are existing "double tempo" and "half tempo" presets, but all they do is divide position by half. That means if I try to squish notes that start at the 4th measure, they get squished AND move to the 2nd measure. What we really need is a way to use the "position of the first note" inside the logical editor operations, but I didn't see how that is possible yet.
Erasing notes:
In FL Studio it is possible to erase notes by right clicking. But it is not necessary to be accurate with it. instead, right clicking anywhere on the piano roll, then you can drag the mouse over any number of arbitrary notes and they will get erased as soon as the mouse cursor touches those notes. For me, I use this often to clean up midi recordings or to do orchestration. For example, if I made a 3-part prototype, I may copy paste it to the tenor part and want to delete all the notes unrelated to the tenor part. For clustered or interwoven lines, it's grueling to delete notes by selecting or erasing them. It's much faster to be able to just "touch" all the notes to be deleted.
Most other things that I commonly do in FL Studio can be done reasonably fast in Cubase too (after a lot of digging and learning this past several days). I didn't realize how often I do these particular tasks until I have been trying to get around them in Cubase.
Thanks!