So, adding a control to the view.ascx in the empty project doesn't cause the module load exception and all the warnings remain. Since the vb source for the dnnsimplearticle seemed like a good place to start I attempted to convert that to VS2013. No joy on the conversion, the MSBuildtasks just wouldn't come over, so I figure I copy all the simple article components to the newly create project. 

I then compared at the text level the project files for the new project vs the old vbproj in simple article. There were a LOT of global imports, so I added all of them. Fixed all the compile errors, but the DNN controls like tags, etc, aren't recognized.

So maybe there's an oddity with VS2013, but I guess I'll have to go to my other machine that's still got older VS versions on it and try there.