>... as flexible as we though about Fox it was a "do it my way" forcing you to write very strange code to do anything out of the normal.

It's only a matter of how far can you get before getting to that point, and what will tip the work in that direction. When I look at the last 35 years (yup, starting with Sinclair ZX), it was always near. It's either surpassing the limitations of the language, stumbling upon a bug (M$ Cobol's indexes break after 32767 records, 1987, CP/M), having to combine outside code (VAX/PDP cobol wouldn't have real numbers as exponents, use Vax Basic for that part), mFoxPlus didn't have LLFF or textmerge, use Set Alternate to generate code and beware of 0x1A EOF marker), it also didn't have SQL so we had to include a field in a related table in the temp index expression for reporting; VPM didn't have a routine to migrate from one version to next (unless you call a list of single-step converters and many manual steps a migrator) so had to write one; VFP has no function to relate between page's index and .pageorder, so had to create an array with references etc etc.

And yes I too got to the point where I sat with the debugger looking into jQuery 20 levels deep...

It just comes with the territory. You get a tools which does what it does. You make it do what you need.