>Maybe some just would like to leverage what they have rather than begin a cycle of developing expertise all over again.

Have you missed the VB .NET uprising? I would guess VFP would have to change enough that you'd have to ramp up at least as much as it would take to learn C# or VB .NET (but remember that I'm the guy that thinks all languages are the same, just with different dialects). So why not just learn one of those two languages rather than burn the VFP team's limited resources? We'll never have time to add features to the report writer if we had to compile to the CLR. (Disclaimer: the previous statement was an attempt at humor. Call it sarcasm, call it facetiousness, call it what you will, but it implies no promise of any new features for the next version of VFP.)