Quite true, hence why I say that the problem is human and not technical.
Those of us that come from Wirth languages always put quality and delivering what the program is expected to do before going crazy with optimizations.
I always got the feel that many in the C communities write code as if they were micro-optimizing every single line, just because.
And those that care about type safe driven programming in C++ usually have background in safer languages.
One of my goals now is to outline safe ways of using C++ for various projects and I'm not too optimistic. In fact I'm unsure what we'll end up with.