I wonder whether AxisDJ and friends have considered existing efforts.

For example, there is the language formerly known as KBasic that is supposed to accept conventional VB6 syntax as well as having its own language extensions.

I doubt it imports existing VB6 Projects, but then I doubt any Olaf effort would either since I was pretty sure the goal there was to build on top of his Cairo wrapper for the user interface.

They claim it compiles to native code, though I wouldn't be surprised if it actually generates p-code wrapped into an EXE along with an interpreter. But it has been years since I've even looked at it. Since it targets Mac and Linux as well as Windows it probably isn't going to be quite as native as VB6, for example it may not have any COM support at all even on Windows.

Pooling efforts or jumping onto pre-existing coattails is probably the only way to grow a decent sized community though.