Yeah - feels too late to turn that ship around. If you instead focused on making a VB6-like language that just had enough features to interact cleanly with most

Yeah - feels too late to turn that ship around. If you instead focused on making a VB6-like language that just had enough features to interact cleanly with most .NET APIs... you'd end up in a very different place today than where VB.NET has been taken by its attempt to have every C# feature implemented with just a different, more wordy syntax. Especially as you could lean on a lot of the DLR functionality to provide VB-like 'variant' types.