>More than anything else, the design simply looks like you're breaking a whole bunch of encapsulation rules.

<s>
I see your point. Markus wrote something about this in an article for CoDe ("Visual Inheritance in .NET", or something like that...)... I'm gonna try to find where's that and point it out for you. (I still didn't play that much with visual inheritance in .Net).

Anyway, in regards to "non-visual" inheritance, you may take a look at this white-paper:
http://www.eps-cs.com/pdf/whitepaper_vfp310.pdf

we're gonna appreciate your feedback. ;)