I'm not talking about database performance, I'm talking about UI performance and resource utilization.

The UI was slower than FP2.6. So was Powerbuilder's. When it eventually got 32-bit, VB's was slower than 16-bit VB. Delphi32 wasn't, but that wasn't released yet.

The biggest slowness came when thunking back to 16-bit on an old plodder. The biggest consistent UI performance issue was tabsets. People came up with all sorts of strategies to avoid pre-loading large tabsets which essentially were giant forms in VFP.

The biggest problem I experienced was a memory leak when requerying remote data rapidly. It used all system resources over time and could not be worked around. Eventually it was fixed.

Those are some negatives. Against them I posit built-in rather than roll-your-own C/S access, inheritance and encapsulation, injection-proof data access by default, free change tracking, a grid, multiple distinct datasessions, more control events than valid and when, increased number of simultaneous aliases, long field names... I could go on and on. Yes there were bugs, just as there are in any completely new product. But to paraphrase one of your own charming comments- if we all thought that way, we'd all still be using FP2. Precisely.