You're right: it's primitives sucked. However, VB let people do a huge amount of work without code: Think the GUI designer, VBX/OCX controls, and OLE embedding. That's the power i was talking about, not a way to implement advanced algorithms. (People used freaking SQL databases to get passable data structures... Ugh!) Most code I've seen people writing was more related to that gluey crap than advanced topics.
Side-note: Most of my work in the past year has been done in R.
Those weren't really parts of the language, though; they were parts of the platform. We inconsistently compare languages (i.e. Java) to platforms (i.e. the JVM), which is, I think, a lot of the reason we're so bad at comparing both.
Side-note: Most of my work in the past year has been done in R.