It had hot code editing and a hot code editing debugger. To me, these were the main features that were interesting about VB6 vs. Delphi. Delphi won in basically

It had hot code editing and a hot code editing debugger. To me, these were the main features that were interesting about VB6 vs. Delphi. Delphi won in basically every other axis (databinding, real OO, visual inheritance, etc.). Also, while it certainly had some sharp edges, the ActiveX / COM component system (ActiveX Controls) was pretty good; you could make reusable UI blocks as a first-class citizen in the IDE. You'd just pick an ActiveX Control as your product and the thing it produced was an OCX you could just drag onto another project, where it would spring forth as a full first-class item on your form (unless the initialization failed, which in fairness it frequently did). There was a good commercial ecosystem for buying stuff, too; charts, graphs, insanely complicated data tables, it was all there for some moderate price. This culture carried over to .NET to a good extent, but it never really reached the peak it did with Visual Studio 6. What's funny is that we have all of these capabilities today, still, we haven't "forgotten" about "how to VB6," we've just decided we can't use them because: * Screen sizes and DPI ratios are highly variable and so there is a high demand for dynamic layout, which is difficult to express in a visual editor. * Source control is more popular than it was. * More front-end code is built collaboratively, so not only do artifacts need to be controllable, they need to be diffable. Nobody has really managed a diffing solution that humans like that's not lines-of-code (and trust me, they've tried, I have years worth of Thoughts about this!), so this really means "the UI designer needs to decompose to human readable line oriented statements" - which is where we went from VB6 (and Interface Builder NIBs, and so on and so forth) to newer generation UI technologies or a preference towards layout-in-code like SwiftUI. * Cross-platform compatibility is more important than it was, and every cross-platform non-web UI framework got extinguished in the early 2000s by a combination of security becoming a real concern and Steve Jobs, to be replaced by web-based frameworks today.