i used VMS in the very early 80s, when i was working at a college which was part of the university of london. i never cottoned on to it - that versioning file system (obviously designed to sell hard disks) and all that SYS$SYSTEM stuff (i mean - why?). and then i changed jobs somewhere else, using a dec-10, and discovered what a really horrible OS was like.
I feel your pain. Used to run IT at Birkbeck College and they were huge on VMS. IIRC the University of London library system at the time, Libertas, depended on VAX. As a UNIX person it was wild. But credit where it is due: that thing was bulletproof.
I remember back when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was a shop running VMS for (I think) some financial institution that left a skeleton crew onsite to keep things running. They had 3 sites (if I recall) across the US, but for whatever reason they needed all 3 up as long as possible, so those guys manned the generator. They were doing live blog updates, which was pretty wild at the time.
Eventually the site went offline, but the other VMS sites picked up without losing any data.
Sadly, I can't find anything about this company in a few minutes of searching, so my vague memories are all I have. But I thought it was so cool that the other sites seamlessly picked up when the New Orleans site went down.