There is a obvious lack of communications going on here but that seems to be something not unusual. I would not expect any product to be backward compatible when adding a new feature or functionality.

Not so, in all of VFP's releases, from 3 to 7 so far, they are backward compatible. Meaning you can use them, recompile and as long as you do not use any of the new stuff, they will run your old stuff just fine, and you can go back to a previous version if you want.

VB.Net (VB7) is a different animal. If you care to stay in VB6 and not upgrade, then you'll be fine, but stuck in the past. If you want to migrate your existing VB apps to VB7, then you have to re-engineer them and then they will not be backwards compatible anymore. This is due to the use of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and introduction of OOP among other things.