Microsoft actually did release a good tool for the non-professional segment for writing database apps called lightswitch, that was better, higher level than VB. But they stopped selling it after some time. Shame.
It's actually a general problem in the market for software development tools, somehow the market for them isn't functioning well, and some great tools that we know how to build aren't produced.
Lightswitch was an amazing example of poor positioning. If you looked at the marketing material for it, it was positioned as a tool to "build three tier web applications" followed by a bunch of words that I didn't really understand.
It's really sad, because the tech there was really impressive.
Lightswitch was also tightly coupled with Silverlight when first released. The death of Silverlight doomed it. I believe that there is an HTML output version, but I doubt there is much interest.
For a very brief period of time it was actually a standalone product that was being developed when I was at MSFT (2010ish), but eventually they just rolled it into VS.
It's actually a general problem in the market for software development tools, somehow the market for them isn't functioning well, and some great tools that we know how to build aren't produced.