[arthurfm]

> It's also made even uglier by the fact that VMware has discontinued Fusion

It doesn't look like Fusion has been discontinued. [1]

"The Fusion and Workstation teams are having a very busy year. Since we shipped Fusion 8 and Workstation 12 almost a year ago, we’ve been busy adding new skills to the development teams so that we can take the products in a new and compelling direction. Added to that, the team has released several updates that you really should be loading on to your systems – they make the products better in a bunch of ways that are described here, here and here."

[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2016/07/meet-the-team.htm...

[tw04]

My understanding is they gutted the entire fusion and workstation teams (firing all US employees), and shipped it over to China for long-term maintenance. That blog post kind of confirms it... the core team working on ESX is in the US, the "Hosted-UI" - fusion and workstation teams - all appear to be Chinese. To say that the core ESX components are the base and the Hosted-UI team just puts a UI on top seems preposterous to me. If that's the case I would expect a lockstep release of all the products, and the same feature functionality if all they're doing is adding a GUI. That's simply not the case.