Fawcette Technical Publications Inc. Run With Scissors. The point was to assure the large base of VB developers that, although VB4 was a big change from 3.0, it was still something they could feel at home with. The switch from VB3 to VB4 took years. Many developers worked with VB3 during the day and learned VB4 at night for a year or more before their companies made the investments in computers to support 32-bit development and the developers had mastered the tool. Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
NET is much larger.
I see more disagreement about the transition from VB6 to VB.NET than with any prior release. A vocal camp believes that VB.NET isn't VB at all. It might as well be Visual Fred. To others, that's just fine. There's an entirely new runtime, a new forms engine, and even the logic is different.