They don't always deserve respect.
It depends on the VB (or VBA) coder.
If the coder in question can "make it sit up and beg", then turn around and write good, clean code in C, Objective-C, Haskell, Lisp, Ruby, et cetera -- then yeah, he or she definitely deserves mad props for being able to wrangle VB(A) so well. If the person can only do the VB(A) wrangling, however, he or she is basically just a brain-damaged bridge troll, and probably beyond redemption or rescue -- and probably prone to using VB(A) for purposes that are wholly inappropriate to it, like people who essentially write entire database driven applications as horribly gnarled tangles of VBA macros in Excel spreadsheets.
