I think python's popularity is partly because it found a sweet spot that was neither too expressive nor too verbose. It's certainly possible to dial up the expressiveness (LISP, Perl) or dial it down (Golang, VB) and get something that is harder to maintain both ways.
As a library author you can write effective python at different levels. Some involve quite heavy meta-programming (jinja2, collections.namedtuple, django's ORM) and most users would never find this out.
> Language power is inversely related to maintainability/readability,
Perl and Python are both considered equally powerful languages, yet Perl is a fair bit more expressive and as a result is often harder to maintain.
The law of power linked above says to use the least powerful language appropriate for the task. So it's possible VB6 fell into the category not-powerful-enough/not-appropriate.
Is that really True?
Having worked on VB6 codebases in the past, the less powerful nature of the language just meant a LOT more code which is definitely harder to maintain.