VLIW in reality was actually worse (see Itanium as an example) than the currently favored superscalar out of order execution with register renaming. Both of these techniques try to take advantage of instruction level parallelism inherent in pretty much all code.

The reason for failure is that VLIW is basically stuck with whatever the compiler decides can be done. OoO does it dynamically. In the end the only real drawback with OoO vs VLIW is the chip area and increased power consumption required for the logic.