"> as far as I can tell C# offers little or nothing more but has just a different flavor of syntactic sugar, one related to C and that I don't like. I believe that, compared with C#, Visual Basic .NET is easier to read on the page, is less prone to bugs due to being more verbose, and will be easier to teach to new staff. Where am I going wrong?"
"VB.NET suffers somewhat from the poor reputation of previous variants; it is probably not as bad as all that. "
Absolutely. Nothing to do with VB6.
"That said, more verbose code tends to be more prone to bugs, not less, and I imagine it's a less structured language."
It doesn't need to be. I have in front of me a very nice codebase in VB.NET.
"Less structure makes it easier to start a program but harder to maintain and develop it - for a maintainable program you need a language that enforces separation between different layers and makes it very clear which parts of the program can and can't affect other parts of the program. "
That's exactly the same in VB.NET than in C#. You declare your classes as Public, Private, etc..
"Whereas in the early stages it's very convenient if you can just change everything from everywhere."
I think the differences are mostly syntactic and readability.
I prefer VB style because I've been exposed to it the last 5 years, but my first years I thought I would be caught dead before writing in a non-C style language (money convinced me otherwise :P ).