I don't know why they don't deprecate (but still support) both VBA and VB and just buy something like PYXLL for Excel integration and pump some support into IronPython for the CLR runtime, allowing ...

99.9% is too generous. It's more like 99.999%. And the times when people think "If only I could compile this to native code, my problems would be solved!" can usually be solved with better algorithms ...