Doesn't surprise me, you are not alone in this as others who have used classic VB do not really see the difference between classic VB and VB.NET and to some extent not even (most of) Microsoft seems to get what makes classic VB special :-P. However i'm not sure how i could describe it better than the last paragraph in my reply above as to me the difference between the two is day and night.

It is kinda similar to not understanding how something like a jury rigged Vim with a GDB, file list manager and ctags parser differs from a real IDE even after having used the latter. Usually i'd say "you need to experience the real thing" but if you do not get it after you do, then i'm at a loss of words.