What you want depends on what you intend to happen to your work. The advantage of an open public standard (of which ABC is one) is that the effort you put into your transcription need not be redone. Do it directly on paper or in a proprietary format, and the only way to re-use your work in the future (when too many generations of photocopying have elapsed, the paper is crumbling, or the developer of your package has been archived on the Great 8-Inch Floppy in the Sky) is to notate it all over again.

I generally use staff notation to play from. I can get what I want much faster by typing ABC into BarFly than by writing on music paper. And since my eyesight is poor and getting worse, it's an enormous advantage that BarFly lets me choose arbitrary print size and format, so I can make pages I can easily read. I would need to work with india ink and graphic dip pens to get a comparably useful result directly on paper. I am pretty good in that medium, but have you tried correcting that?

MIDI is a pain in the bum if you want to get staff notation out of it.

The absolute pits is the MIDI-generated ABC you sometimes see posted here with the self-righteous footnote "This program is worth the effort of learning it". The metre and note durations are whatever come out from the fingers with no attempt at making any two notes or bars the same length. Some ABC players can reproduce the intended sound but no software can create a usable score from it.