I'd say that exceptions are the biggest source of pain if you don't have RAII.

Or, rephrased: RAII is incredibly attractive, especially when exceptions are being used.

RAII is necessary for exceptions. Why the hell would you do that to yourself?

How do you deal with constructors that might fail?

You don't have constructors that 'fail'.

So, allocating memory for objects is not part of construction? Again, why not just stick with C?

Memory for objects is allocated structurally as part of the object, not dynamically, wherever possible. And it's usually very possible. If you can't do that, provide an initialization method. (In almost all cases, I would personally prefer hiding that two-phase initialization within a factory function.)

As for "why not stick with C"--all of the other reasons still hold true, from templates on down. The simple existence of dtors with viable scope guards that are guaranteed to fire when exiting scope is reason enough for me to never write C and to look with a default skepticism on any codebase that thinks its developers are perfect enough not to need them.

> Again, why not just stick with C?

The thing that is hard to replicate in C is destructors. Automatic deinitialization when leaving scope in very convenient. It allows you to have multiple exists from the scope without preceding each of them with prologue of dinit_*() calls or creating single exit point and jumping to it.

Coupling allocation with initialization is trivial to do without C++ constructors (which I find to be very poorly designed).

C doesn't let you have destructors that automatically clean up whatever got initialised in the Init method (if it was called), but C++ does.