vb.net is likely way better than vb6 for countless reasons, one being MSIL, second is the .NET framework, and finally: object orientation that actually means object orientation
die hard vb6 coders are a dying breed (no pun intended), and while im sure there may still be some abandoned warehouse in which you can find plenty of them, no one in their right mind would start a new project using that platform, as there's *no* support for it. the only coders out there now are supporting legacy systems-- and again, relative to any other language in the world, vb is a minority.
Don't believe me, here's some hard data:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~flab/languages.html is a cute graph, though it would be reasonable to call it skewed since i doubt many people coding in VB know what open source means... This also lumps VB6 with .NET... I'll bet that chops down a bunch of the numbers, maybe by 30-40% at least. I wish I could find stats on VB6 vs. .NET users.
this is probably a little more accurate:
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/comp.lang-statistics/ since it encompasses mailing lists, which is something that VB users are more likely to use across the board. The interesting thing is that you can actually see the fall off of the "basic" (which i imagine encompasses VB) thread from being #3 in 1997 to #15 in 2007, and its falling exponentially. Even FORTRAN is more active than basic.. that doesn't say much at all. And again, this encompasses all *basics, visual, non, and .NET, probably.
Here are the results from another angle, search terms:
http://www.welton.it/articles/language_popularity.htmlOnce again, while VB isn't "dead", look what it's competing with.. shell programming. Keep in mind that just like the others, it doesnt differentiate VB6 from .NET.
Note that while all of these results are in themselves skewed to one specific use case-- none of them cast VB in the same light you do.. ie. if I were to interview 100 programmers, only about 3 of them would be using VB, according to most of those results. It surely does *not* say that "more users on vb6 than most other design apps", that's for sure.
Atleast VB.NET bring .NET goodness! 