Also I'm kind of thinking the major difficulty with deciding on what a new VB6 would be like is something like this:

From a syntax perspective, we've got many vibrant candidates for language features that'd be great in a non-programmer language. The pendulum could swing to the less-object-oriented VB6 and I'd be fine with it. Buy me a drink and I'd agree it might be easier to teach a newbie how to work with OOP if you first don't let them use OOP at all. Either way, I don't think this is the hurdle, though a lot of people like to get hung up on it, me included.

But there's a million languages out there that make it drop-dead easy to write a console program. What really made VB6 kick major butt was how easy it made developing a UI application. And we're in a real pickle in terms of UI client development.

I think part of why VB worked so well is for a brief few decades, the UI paradigm and metaphors stabilized. Color depth and screen resolutions got bigger, but most of the superficial changes to apps like shading on buttons were things you expected Windows to update for you without much hassle. Now we can't agree on aspect ratios, dot pitch, whether buttons should be shaded, etc. It's hard to present a cohesive UI framework when the expectation of "what an app looks like" shifts every 2-3 years. And there's lots of different directions we could be headed:
  • The return of the Desktop.
  • The return of the Desktop, except you have to use something like WPF.
  • The death of the Desktop, to be replaced by web "applications" using JS bridges.
  • The death of the Desktop, to be replaced by cross-platform application frameworks like Xamarin's.
  • The death of the Desktop, to be replaced by a platform that transcends hardware like UWP.
  • The death of Windows, leaving web/x-platform/a new platform dominant.
  • VR/AR destroys the concept of 'a monitor'.

Some of those are a lot more likely than others. But each requires a VB that looks a little different, or has a different kind of toolkit.

The best "new VB" will be the absolute best way to write a GUI application. Right now I don't know which of 2 or 3 of the options above will come out on top. If the industry can't settle on a UI paradigm, there's really not a way for a "new VB" to assert its role.