Maybe I'm not getting something, but ...
You mentioned that you have everything on separate staves at the moment--why wouldn't you extract those into parts before combining them? If you did, then you're only dealing with the implosion issue (making a more-handy conductors score), not trying to figure out how to extract separate parts from an already-imploded stave.
Yes, I guess I could do that. I prefer to have a one-way pipeline, where there is one score where I do all the composition/editing, and then I extract parts from there. Ideally my composition would all be done into the score as the conductor would see it, and then I issue a single extract command that will give me all my parts broken out. I'm prepared to do the necessary editing to produce the final individual parts. I'd rather not have to also do a major editing job to produce a consolidated score.
In addition, this more consolidated score would be useful during the compositional process because I'd see more useful staves on the screen at any time.
Thinking out loud -- brainstorming... Wouldn't it be neat if Finale one day replaced all that 2-voice and 4-layer stuff with a more generic "outlining" capability, analogous to the outlining feature you see in Word and Excel? With such a capability, you could group related instruments just like you group related line items in a spreadsheet. Click on the "plus" button and you would see each voice in its own staff. Click on the "minus" button and all those voices would be rolled up to one staff or one grand staff as needed. In part extraction, you could choose to extract the individual staves or the rolled-up levels.
With such a feature, there would be little need for the "program staff sets" feature either.
It would obviously be a very sophisticated feature, but that could be extremely intuitive and powerful.
I now return you to 2003, which is already in progress. :)
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