No, VAX instructions are much easier to understand. You have one byte of opcode which specifies the operation in it's entirety which is followed by an adressing

No, VAX instructions are much easier to understand. You have one byte of opcode which specifies the operation in it's entirety which is followed by an adressing mode byte and (depending on addressing mode) an immediate value for each operand. It's not quite as neat as the PDP-11 instruction set but still pretty nice. x86 otoh is just insane imo.