In that context, many VB users experienced a cold fear at the idea of VB being relegated to the role of a glorified scripting language. Remember, this was long before true scripting languages existed, and even OLE was just starting to become usable. No serious VB developer wanted to see the best language on Earth get sent to a dead end and become trivialized as a glue tying real applications together to support the new OLE technology. Fortunately, VB continued to grow, and while it's an ideal glue for other applications, it's not limited to such duties. When you build a complex structure, anything from a database to a Web site, you create a maze of dependencies.
Object models are a fantastic concept.
But in any nontrivial application, they can get away from you easily. The result can be a house of bricks that comes crashing down like a house of cards, but with more dramatic consequences. Visio Professional is mortar, because once it insinuates itself into the bricks, it holds them together, with one glaring deficiency, which I'll address shortly. It evaluates your structures, displays a graphical representation of their layouts, then allows you to maintain the structures. So Far Now, for that caveat I mentioned earlier.