Dorico, and I positively love it. I do obsess about engraving more than the average Joe though (I presume anyway).

If you mean the title, it is a special font with additional ligatures that you copy from the font files.

Lyrics are very satisfactory at present )esp. after v3 added individually adjustable baselines. There are only a few features I hope to see in the future, but by-and-large there is very little I can't finagle to satisfaction (and Dorico requires comparably little finagling to begin with!). The one thing it can't do yet is automatically left-align verse numbers on all staves (it aligns them within each stave, but not between staves); that said, you can manually adjust things to fix that if necessary. All told, I can't imagine going back to Sibelius (and I'd scream if forced to use Finale again—no offense intended to Finale users out there!). It really has revolutionized the way I work.

(re: Dorico— another thing in its favor is the concept of "flows". I made a 75 page worship aid booklet for the Easter Triduum last year. Our masses were split between english, latin, and spanish, so a guide was really necessary. I engraved all the music required by the congregation; each snippet/hymn was its own flow, all within the same file. This meant that when I exported everything, the settings were all the same since they had their genesis in the same file. It was wonderful being able to have 25 things, all as separate chunks, engraved with perfect uniformity, and I only had to set my house style once!)

I wondered. In that case, all I did was create a special free-floating text item (anchored to the first note), scaled it way up, turned off collision avoidance, and then dragged it into place manually to create the illusion that it is a part of the lyric. In truth it isn’t part of the lyrics; it simply appears so.

Oh dear me… this was almost five years ago. I have no idea. I probably adapted the rhythms at the time to make them reflect the style of psalmody my then-choir was singing. Which is to say, the way the note values look, not how they are interpreted.