"And the best way to avoid communication is to have some "culture" - which is just another way to say "collection of rules that don't even need to be written down/spoken, since people are aware of it". Sure, we obviously have a lot of documentation about how things are supposed to be done, but exactly as with any regular human culture, documentation is kind of secondary."

This is so true - I have zero problems with context sensitivity and difficulty reading C++ if its all consistently done according to my prefered standards (which I mostly inherited from an especially well managed employer), avoiding the "bad practices" that introduce these problems like namespaces and such. Yet if I dive into some poorly organised and written code I can easily spend a whole day debugging a trivial problem - simply because the time is wasted trying to understand what is happening.

The sad truth is that the latter case is more common - its not C++'s fault though (although it could just /not/ try and provide every imaginable feature) - its more bad management than anything else. Though I can't help but wonder if that is just unavoidable for inherently difficult to manage projects like this...