Delphi and VB and VC++ and the C Compiler suites for Solaris, AIX and IRIX were mostly fine by themselves, but cost money. Particularly the latter.
Nowadays you see people closing the nagbox in SublimeText to save 10 bucks (or whatever amount this is); back then nothing was free (as beer) and even less free (as speech).
The main thing that modern open source tools do better is the performance of the produced executable by modern compilers is better. But everything else, especially when you go into UI and UX, is much much worse (and most programmers increasingly treating their computers' UIs like terminals from the 70s doesn't help).
I'll agree that the majority of developers today do not want to pay for their tools, but of course with the proliferation of free (as in beer) tools it is expected that the value that people see in their tools (especially when they are surrounded by free tools, like programmers are) will drop dramatically.
Also all the tools you mentioned were incredibly productive and with way better documented than any equivalent open source solution today - assuming there is an equivalent open source solution (especially for something like dbase where the best you can find is somewhere between the awful joke that is LibreOffice Base and the plain awfulness of Harbour).
Honestly you used the worst examples you could come up with if you wanted to paint a "proprietary software bad, open source software good" image. Those were excellent tools (yes, including Visual Basic, which like any user friendly tool with a very low barrier to entry was abused to hell and beyond, thus - again like any user friendly low barrier tool - got a bad name for itself).