pendean, I am aware of why this happened, however there should be a SAVE AS option for the template so previous versions can read it.  There is ABSOLUTELY no reason for this to be an issue.  If you have a CAD Manager using a newer version of AutoCad and he creates Templates for pre 18 users, there should be a viable option to save a Template to compatible with previous versions within the same company product.  You should not have to jump through hoops to create templates that a company uses where potentially there are various versions being used.

As far as the release date comment, there was only 3 months between releases.  You can't tell me that AutoDesk is not smart enough to see the issue.  I mean if 2018 DWGs file types were that important, then 2018 would default to that version, not to 2013...Right?

Any way I reach out to @autodeskhelp on twitter and they completely agree with me and have asked the Devs to look into.  I am not the only one who thinks this is odd, regardless of a new file type (which by the way is needed since its been 5+ years since the last).