I made the tranistion to VB.NET.. And it was a little tough.. having done one consulting gig in Java certainly helped (they basically copied many aspects of Java for .NET languages)...
I then transitionted to C#.. a little tough also (like trying to figure out how to pass optional variables to a function -- you can't have optional parms in C#, but the workaround is to use the SqlString datatype which accepts null values, hence making the values optional....)
.Net indeed has it's own problems, and I will admit not everyone is cut out to be a OOP programmer -- which one reason why VB became so popular in the first place. However, these people just need to apply themselves and stop whining... They never bothered to learn .net -- I had to do it on my own and in my spare time...
The benefits of .NET are awesome, especially for websites... Nothing like populating a datagrid with a few lines of code..
Have you seen the .NET 2.0 beta yet? The ease of use is quite high.
VB.NET has a conversion program for version 6. It seems well suited as a teaching tool in some ways. Anything it cannot convert, it usually tells you why and points to somewhere in the help so that you can fix it yourself. It still misses some things, but it covers a lot of ground.
Meanwhile...Inside MS .Net has lost its shine as well. I expect .Net to go the way of OLE, COM, asp, COM++, etc. and morph into something new in a couple of years.
Thankfully, a few years ago I graduated to perl which pretty much hasn't changed on me once. (I wasn't perlling during perl 4 days)