1) If VMware Workstation 12 Pro is a 64-bit application, why is the only location that it appears is in C:\Program Files (x86)?
2) There is no VMware folder in C:\Program Files. Why is this?
Sorry, the Windows installer is very far away from my area of expertise, so I can't answer these. I would imagine that our mix of 32-bit and 64-bit executables would make things unconventional at the very least. (I'm trying to help out, but I'm neither a Windows person nor an installer person...)
3) If vmware-vmx.exe is a separate 64-bit application, why does it not appear in Windows Task Manager when a virtual machine is running?
It should appear in the process list, but it runs with different identity/privilege, so you may need to select a "Show all processes" or "Show processes from other users" option in order to see it. If I remember correctly, it's considered a separate "process" but not a separate "application" (but I might be wrong about that, or it might depend on your Windows version, etc...).
4) Why does the 64-bit VMware Workstation 12 Pro package use any 32-bit application?
5) Further to question 4; Does this mean that the 64-bit VMware Workstation 12 Pro package was rushed out before it was made completely 64-bit?
There is one answer to these two questions, and it is a very practical but possibly-unpopular answer. Any time a piece of software is released, a balance needs to be struck between getting as much of the prioritized to-do list done as possible while still actually releasing a product. If you try to release "too soon", there will still be high priority items that aren't fixed/implemented/addressed. Spend too much time fixing everything, and you'll release "too late" and your customers complain that you're not supporting the latest technologies (CPUs, operating systems, peripherals, etc.) and not responding to customer needs. It's a huge challenge to release a fully-finished and fully up-to-date system-level product in a rapidly-moving ecosystem, so we have to depend on the prioritized to-do list to ship something that tries to meet the needs of the majority of our customers at that time as best as we can. In the absence of unlimited engineering resources, there will always be things that we'd like to complete that just can't be done in time for the release.
Our Windows user-interface was originally written in the late 1990s, long before any notion of 64-bit Windows for x86/x64. Moving the user interface to 64-bit has been on our to-do list for quite a while, but I've heard that the task is deceptively complex (much larger than switching to a 64-bit compiler and hitting the "compile" button), and I gather that the task is not yet complete. I know that we've been working on it; I don't know why it's not yet in your hands. As far as I know, there is currently no impact (or very nearly no impact) to having a 32-bit UI, so it would seem that it was justifiably treated as an item that would not strictly need to be completed before the release of Workstation 12. From a rational release-management perspective, that doesn't in any way imply that Workstation 12 was "rushed out".
I hope that my explanation is satisfactory.
Cheers,
--
Darius