That's certainly an interesting approach. Reminds me of the old SCORE system. But unless I misunderstood your suggestion, it becomes rather inconvenient and inefficient for larger scores, particularly if changes have to be made to the notes later down the line, i.e., having to modify multiple sets of music just to change a few notes..
A fair point. I'm basically just a copyist, I guess would be the term. I'm not a musician - I just produce cleaned up and sometimes somewhat altered sheet music for others based on already existing sources.. So generally the changes have already been sorted out by the time I get my hands on it. Also the pieces I'm working with tend to be relatively short (more than 3 or 4 pages is uncommon), so if more changes are needed it's generally not too much of a hassle.