They're trying to steer people away from end-user programming towards using more well-defined, tested, features. I find it patronizing, but, having seen some VBA, understand the reasoning.
Can't have user-programmable tools, because they could be used to ship (gasp!) malware, or let users (GASP!) work around policies of their employers' IT staff.
VBA can't really be removed due to the need to support legacy files (especially Excel). For more sophisticated stuff they expect you to use Office Developer Tools or similar now.
Money? Internal elitism?