Isn't that the point though? VB6 did enable non-programmers to produce functional apps and I think that's a good thing. Us "trained professionals" can sit in our ivory towers and pour scorn if we wish but those non-programmers produce ALOT of working functionality for the companies they work for, whether that's excel macros, python scripts, batch files or any other medium that enabled them to get the job done.

Where I think I really differ is in the belief that .Net is daunting - or rather that it has to be daunting. The actual act of throwing together a simple single form app that does some simple work is really no different in .Net than it was in VB6. I think the problem non-programmers face is that .Net framework and the ide has loads of features they don't care or need to know about at first and that, I can see, can be intimidating. Then they go on line to look up how to find an item in an array and they're presented with Linq and Lambdas before they've really had a chance to just loop it and do a comparison. They get information overload.

IMO, if MS want to make .Net accessible to the masses in the way that VB6 was all they really need to do is provide a beginners version (or a beginners "mode" in the full version) with a cut down framework and some tutorials right there in the IDE so the user doesn't have to go to google the first time they get stuck.