I don't think it'll come as a surprise to anyone that I fully agree with everything you've said here. While in a perfect world, it'd be nice if VFP could be in the CLR arena without losing any of its current functionality, the world isn't perfect. If I need an application that needs to run under the CLR, I'll write it in VB.NET or C#. If I need to munge data under Win32, I'll write it in VFP.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Making VFP a CLR language makes it nothing more than a bad version of VB.NET and most certainly would kill the product.
George
Ubi caritas et amor, deus ibi est