I dunno why this gave me so much trouble. I wish someone would have pointed me in the right direction but alas - the problem was working against the framework.
Doc/view is actually quite useful because I can switch the doc/view pair at any time via a pointer - and the main frame window stays the same.
So I just put all my data in the document class, which it just so happens that the view class has a way to get a pointer to the document which solves all of my access and communication problems between classes.
So for those using doc/view -
Document - stores all the information.
View - draws in the window based on the information.
So in my case the document class contains a map pointer, a tile manager pointer, and some other variables to specify map size, tile size, etc.
The view class retrieves a pointer to the document class and gets a pointer to the needed information and/or has access to the information (by declaring the data members needed as public in the document class). Then it draws the tile map based on the information.
Now why couldn't the SDK say that in English?
So far it works great....that is until MFC crashed again. This is the third time I've rebuilt the project.....but so far nothing major has been lost.