I honestly miss VB, there was just something about it.

Yup. Even for non-UI applications.

Our site at the time was Active Server Pages, with a DCOM backend. We started out writing the DCOM components in C++, but way more than half of the C++ code was in just type conversions with the variant types that COM demanded.

We got tired of that really fast, and started building the COM components with VB5/6. That was SO MUCH faster.

Same here. When VB4 came out I wrote a COM based plugin system with it which worked perfectly.