My two cents.

To me Visual Basic.Net only has the word basic in it to denote that the syntax is very similar (though has more keywords) to that of the original BASIC, it's not about whether a BASIC program written in 1980 would run on VB12/.Net 4.5 or not.

Also, I'm in favor of having Option Strict turned on up front, even if I'm doing some quick & dirty coding for something or testing an idea, it saves me more time thinking about the conversations and casting up front than fix it all after the fact. That and you're more able to avoid the unexpected outputs when the code you're testing runs because if you don't put the conversion code in, the compiler will & it may not put in what you intended.