I so wish that D would have taken off :/

I used it at the time of the library split (there was a split in the community regarding the standard library, where Tango was the alternative). The compile time features of D were fantastic and they are still unmatched; as an example: For OpenGL (back then OpenGL 2.x) I could define the vertex attributes and had them checked at compile time when I started to fill the data with glMap! D templates and compile time code generation are on a whole new level, although it made tooling more difficult. If you know constexpr in C++, then this is nothing compared to what D has to offer.

Atari Basic was my very first programming language, so I grew up learning Basic. Having said that: I don’t see any reason why new software should be written in any Basic-dialect except for fun (the same kind of fun like writing a game engine in Ada) or because of legacy reasons. So programming on the C-64, or QBasic and DOS, a.s.o. all those are fun projects, kind of like reenactment of medieval knight fights.

In your case: If you feel comfortable using VB for your personal projects, then go ahead. But for me any variant of VB is awful, and this also applies to PHP. And in a perfect world we also wouldn’t use JavaScript.