The Finale 98 learning curve is so steep partly because the fundamental design is not as intuitive (user-friendly) as it could be. The user often has to puzzle out how to do a task, as opposed to jumping right in and entering notes. Yes, the Simple Entry Palette is intuitive: click on a quarter-note icon then click on the staff where you want a quarter note. But with thirty-two icons to choose from in the Main menu, there's no mouse-over (balloon-help) to tell you even the name of the icon before you click on it.

MusicPrinter Plus is a simpler, less-powerful--but infinitely more user-friendly music notation program. I've used it for simple tasks, even Turkish music, and Józef Pacholczyk used it exclusively for hundreds of musical examples in his recent book on Kashmiri Sufyana Khalam. If you can't find it in your local music store, you'll have to do some sleuthing to find it.