I wonder if there is a whitepaper that documents many of these bugs/quirks for newbies so we can avoid spending countless hours pulling our hair out? Anybody know of such a document?

The best reference that I have ever seen for people coming from a 2.x background is Fundamentals: Building Visual Studio Applications on a Visual FoxPro 6.0 Foundation.

Even though it was written for version 6, the concepts still apply.