Well, all this speculation only reveals one thing ... you've all missed a major point.

I've been through this acquisition mess before as a user.

There once was a series of engineering design apps called "Visual Survey / Roads / Construction" owned by CAiCE Corporation of Florida.  CAiCE Corporation came up with a product that was a survey/geomatics, road/highway design and construction program(s) - in a modular approach.  The product was quite good and they converted a number of US states (high teens) into using the product for highway design and construction purposes.  A switch from Bentley products which rule the DOT arena.  A lucrative area for any company.

In 2001/2002, AutoDesk felt that Land Desktop was getting a bit "long in the tooth" and felt that they could not take it any further.  AutoDesk saw the posibilities of the technology within the CAiCE product, and "acquired" CAiCE Corporation and it's products in 2002 and placed one of the key designers of CAiCE into the position of chief architect of Land Desktops' sucessor, Civil 3D.  Those of you in the engineering field may recognise that name.

CAiCE Corporation was a privately held company.  The owner of CAiCE Corporation became an AutoDesk VP, most of the employees were let go with a large number of technical & programming staff migrating into AutoDesk.

AutoDesk "dropped the ball" at continuing to develop CAiCE, and therefore "lost" a number of DOTs as clients.  Finally, after 4 years of ignoring the original product, the VPs at AutoDesk realised the size of the market ($$$) they were neglecting, and are now fully supporting those DOTs and major clients that still use CAiCE until Civil 3D reaches parity with the CAiCE product.

Now, 6 years later after the acquisition, there are only 2 or 3 of the original CAiCE employees left within AutoDesk, including the chief architect.  Not sure of what happened of the original owner of CAiCE Corporation, maybe he is still there.

All this tells me that IF Vue is sold to AutoDesk, the original owner will loose all sense of control over the product and over the direction of development. 

It seems to me that Vue is a product created by a few people with a very definite idea of how the product should work and what it should do.  As long as Vue makes a profit and keeps the income stream well enough funded to create new versions of Vue, then Vue will not be sold.  I cannot speak for Mr. Phelps, but I get the impression from the product and the way the developers are talking about it that they are rather passionate about their creation (as are the users).  And people like that do not sell their "baby".

But then, that's my "2 bits" and that's not much coinage any more... ;-D