I share this desire, but it's important for end-users to remember that even if a feature seems arcane and unneeded, you're likely using it indirectly through the libraries you use. Take variadic template parameters for example. The average developer doesn't use these. But very popular library features like make_shared would be at least an order of magnitude more code.

And by making library code easier to write, understand, and maintain, we make it more likely that the more obvious features (like filesystem operations, database abstraction layers, new kinds of data structures, etc.) can be written and maintained.

All that being said, there are completely unecessary warts in C++ that need to be cleaned up. The best thing in-the-trenches C++ developers can do to help with this is to improve the software development lifecycle tooling and practices on the projects they are responsible for. Good automation, static analysis, and testing will make the C++ community more agile and more ready to do the much harder work of deprecating and deleting old technical debt. And it's good for the health of the project anyway.

I agree. C + RAII.

If that's all you want, you might take a look at the `cleanup` attribute for C. It's non-standard, but it is supported by `gcc` and `clang` and is fairly effective.