For me the last 20 years have been a roller coaster! I started professionally in the mid to late 90s mostly as an arranger. A Big Band arrangement used to take me about three months, mostly just making the parts!
Then in 2005 I was introduced to Finale and I loved how it cut my work time from a couple of months to a couple of hours (producing the parts that is...). I still composed/wrote by hand. A year later someone introduced me to Sibelius and I found it much easier to write in so I moved, although I still wrote the core of the work (main score) by hand.
Around 2007 I got my first film commission, to my surprise the director wanted not the charts but the actual music!
. The budget was nowhere near enough for me to hire an orchestra, but it was more than enough for me to buy a PC, a DAW and every library I needed for the project. At this point I started to write exclusively on Sibelius and then dump the MIDI on to Cubase for mixing, mastering and polishing playback. However, I continued to write my more "creative" works by hand, at least the sketches.
In 2015 I was introduce to Staffpad, I loved it straight away because importing the XML in Sibelius was much faster than copying (my terrible handwriting) into Sibelius manually. So now the workflow was Staffpad (sketch) > Sibelius (parts and sync) > Cubase (mockup & production).
Finally last year, after playing around with Dorico for over a year, I made the transition. And now I do 90% of my work there. No more DAWs, no more paper, no more file transfer... I'm a happy camper
! I only ever use Staffpad when I'm away or travelling and since the lockdown, not once...
What a couple of decades!