Good point, the language felt like Visual Basic wrapped in Java's syntax, or maybe a reaction to Java with subtle improvements. There were some nifty things baked in like events and lambdas, but for the most part it didn't feel like I was exploring any fundamentally new constructs or gaining much in the way of expressiveness over C++ with boost. The whole language just feels milquetoast.

It was also difficult to get stuff across the managed/unmanaged boundary without a lot of verbosity and overhead, so optimization was unduly difficult.

But really, it's not the language I hate, the language is mediocre, its the ecosystem around it that's terrible.