<snip>

>I feel that it is somewhat fragile in that the user winds up with unexpected things happening that when I go to debug them, I either can't replicate them, or have a tough time figuring out where to look to find the problem.

I also experienced the same thing. But in my case I made it worst by also adding third party tools with a framework. So at one point when you have a problem you don't know if it's because there is a problem with the framework or if it's an incompatibility between the framework and one of the third party tools or just that there's something about VFP that you don't really get.