>>there is NO technical reason somebody has to jump ship to .NET or, god forbid, PHP.

This is the land of the free and the home of the brave- no one HAS to do anything except pay taxes.
Rather, the question for me was what skills do I need to best:
1- be marketable
2- meet the demands of my clients over the next few years.
.NET looked like a good choice, so I invested a few months of learning and it still looks like it was a good choice.
I still do a lot of VFP but all new development is in .NET.
Were those reasons technical? Of course not. But I don't pay bills with technical currency.
They made good business sense to me.