I do agree that the low entry point in VB did raise the percentage of bad code due to inexperienced coders. This ultimately damaged its rep as many experienced what you have. In turn a hammer also has a low entry point for use, but I can't blame it when I make a mess driving a nail. A good developer could do good things with it (and very very quickly), but unless you had learned and worked in other languages, VB itself wouldn't push you into proper practices. And that was a problem.

Could one argue that a good developer could do good things, but they would then be at the stage where they could realise the same thing could be done better in another language of their choosing?

I only say this because the story is pretty analogous to PHP's. And I'm not saying that to bitch about the language; it's just the way it's gone.

You're very correct, it depends what tools are available. For Win apps in the late 90's there wasn't much that touched some of VB's qualities... reasonable performance, full API access, rapid turn around, good dev environment. For custom software rapid turn around is a huge factor. Delphi was another option but we weren't a Pascal shop. Most of our Win apps then were VB6 sitting on top of home grown C++ DLLs as needed. And you're right, it's very analogous to PHP.