Brad,
If the touch bar is part of the issue, then perhaps I am not seeing it anymore because I reconfigured the touch bar to always show the F1 .. F12 and Escape keys when a VM is focused.
The standard touch bar buttons as offered by VMware Fusion are completely - I think the technical term for it is - useless to me.
Besides that I do sometimes have a need for functions keys so it was a no-brainer for me to reconfigure that.
See the workaround from Zhus here:
Re: Fusion 10 MacBook Pro Touch Bar configuration?
on how-to apply that workaround.
--
Wil