I tend to agree with you with one caveat. We did a C like scripting language and added one thing that C was missing, a variable value that is "undefined" which is not the same as zero. Really simple but now you can do stuff like

pid_t p;

if (defined(p = fork()) { // parent / child stuff here } else { // fork error here }

It's pretty much the same as try / catch, we just implemented it as part of the variable. And any scalar or complex type can be undefined.

I suspect if C had this a lot of these code samples would be a little more clear. Maybe? Dunno, it's worked well for us. And we like C a lot.