Mark,
I think there are a couple good points in your post that deserve comment:
1. I think it is important for everyone to understand that the way DNN Platform is governed and developed has fundamentally changed from what it was in the past. Today the platform is being developed as a community effort. While DNN Corp is still involved and provides some guidance and management, this is not something that happens in a vacuum. The community, through the community steering group, the community working groups, and through these forums provides input on how we should move forward. In addition, the community is actively engaged in implementing the features and functionality for each release along with contributions from DNN Corp. DNN Corp still participates in this process as a member of the community, but we are just one of many sets of stakeholders who are involved in delivering a Platform which addresses the communities needs.
2. There are times in every products life cycle when you have to consider breaking backwards compatibility in order to make significant technological advances. We have had 10 years of relative stability with few intentional breaking changes. The reality is that the way people are developing for the web today is very different from how we built web apps 10 or 15 years ago. In addition, Microsoft has itself realized that the current ASP.Net platform needed a major overhaul in order to stay relevant in today's web development world. We could ignore all of this and continue iterating on DNN as we have been, or we can make some difficult choices and build a DNN Platform that is better suited for modern web development.
3. Ultimately, there are two groups within the DNN community: those that are happy and wish to continue with the current platform, and those who are looking to lead the charge onto the new ASP.Net 5 platform. Those that wish to stay on the current 7.x code base are free to do so. The 7.x codebase will continue to be viable for as long as there is a community of developers who are willing to contribute to maintaining and enhancing the codebase. Those that wish to make the jump to ASP.Net 5 will likewise need to assist in the development efforts as we look to get this version of DNN off the ground. DNN Corp will be contributing development effort to both platforms, however it will take the work of more than just ourselves to make this work. While DNN Corp's primary development effort will focus on DNN neXt, we will continue to provide fixes and enhancements to the current platform for a few more years so that people are not forced to migrate to a new platform immediately. This is very similar to what we did with the DNN 3 and DNN 4 platforms.
4. There is no documentation yet for DNN neXt as there is no code yet for DNN neXt. We are many months away from having anything even remotely resembling production code and at least 3 or more months from having even Alpha level code. While Microsoft has released Beta 2 of ASP.Net 5, they are still a long ways from being feature complete which ultimately impacts how quickly we can move forward.
Part of the reason I created this forum group is so that we can have these discussions in the open and that everyone can see what is going on even as we begin work on DNN 7.5.0 and DNN neXt. I know that this is a stressful time for everyone, but I also know that if we pull together as a community, that we can provide a strong foundation for people wishing to stay on the current WebForms platform even while others choose to jump onboard an MVC based platform.