the thing about vb6 is that the editor, debugger, and form designer tools were really, really, polished
sure enough, the language has warts (-1 is true, there's no way to test if a hashtable contains a key, the erl error line number is undocumented), but the thing is, it was really, really easy to get something up and running—as someone who'd barely done any programming before—because the tooling was that good
and sure enough, the "absolute pixel position please do not resize this box" model of application design was a pain in the ass to use, but in some ways it was easier to debug than a CSS layout issue.
yes, the language is groady, yes, the libraries are so bad, but the tooling? absolutely superb.
sure enough, if you ask people why they never moved to vb.net, maybe they'll mention OCX, COM, or the fact that vb.net was a C# variant rather than a real descendent of vb6, but the truth of the matter: they're a happy little pig in their sty