I've only played with it and not done anything too serious, but Gambas is honestly amazing for something that has seemingly little adoption. It's so similar to VB6, but with tons of enhancements that keep it from feeling too antiquated or annoying to work with.

Development on VB.NET was never as fast as it was on VB6.

Only for those that never bothered with the later improvements to bring back Me and related features.

What VB.NET really missed out was being as easy as VB 6 to produce native binaries and COM libraries. Which also affected the other .NET offerings anyway.

And nowadays CLR seems to mean C# Language Runtime anyway, so that is a moot point.