Hi Ian, ...

You said:

“... I want the notation to be 'as performed'.

And, just to be picky, I don't want to use the Piano Roll !”

I think I understand what you mean. On a few occasions I wanted to do just that, have notes only slightly offset in time and shown so by notation. I did it by editing the notation, only to find out that in some instances Composer reinterpreted the changes as ornaments, which did not make sense in a drum staff.

Related to this and some times a real pain is that Composer always starts up with “Edit as-notated note attacks and durations”. I would prefer if Composer would start up with “Edit both as-notated and as-performed”. If I advance a group of notes by shifting them to the left, I expect the performance to follow and that this is the default behavior.

Best wishes,

Herbert