writing terrible code then begging people to help me improve it
That's been my most commonly used technique although sometimes I only partially apply it

I agree with a lot of the rest of what you've said but I don't think I'd limit it to a criticism of VB6. I see them same in VB.Net and I've definitely seen it in the web development community as well. I used to work with a bunch of data scientists who used Python to query their models and I saw it there too. Come to think of it I think I've seen it to a greater or lesser extent in every language I've worked in. It shouldn't be surprising as "make it work" is the job these people are paid to do. "Design me an architecture" is not. I don't condemn that sort of thinking - it's pragmatic. It doesn't particularly turn me on but I don't condemn it. In fact, it has served me well on many of the projects I've worked on.

In fact, I think this may be one of the cruxes of the 6 vs .Net debate. 6 was only ever intended to serve that kind of quick and dirty approach and it does so with aplomb. The fact that someone with enough skill can take it further is great but it tends to require them to use hacks and techniques the designers never intended or to compromise on the design. .Net was intended to support a more engineered approach from the start. How well MS succeeded in delivering on that intention is subjective and I'm sure we can debate it until the cows come home but the existence of the intention should be undeniable.

I can't remember the members name but we had someone who weighed into these debates and their entire argument distilled to ".Net users are to stupid to use 6, you've got to be a genius to use it". That always struck me as a really stupid argument because the whole point of a language is to make your life easier, not harder.

edit> looks like Dil and I crossed over and said... almost exactly the same things. Guess it's time to book that snowboarding trip to Hades.