How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.
For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... Borland Delphi.
The IDE/designer was at least as good as VB - but the Object Pascal language was so powerful. It was truely object-oriented and if one wanted, one could work at a high level of abstraction. Yet it could also natively drop-down to low-level Windows API's, and handle pointer-based work if necessary.
Unfortunately - for my professional career, Delphi never captured the large-scale Enterprise market - that went to .NET or Java and the rest is history...
(Occasionally I noodle about with FreePascal for the nostalgia factor)
Granted we still had MFC, but then the COM lovers at Microsoft started pushing for ATL, and everything that followed from there.
On the other side we had (and still have) Delphi and C++ Builder, but Borland's management killed the indie culture around them.