C very much does make the fundamental concepts easier to work with, it merely disagrees with you about exactly which concepts are fundamental :).
Sadly, strings are, at the same time, complicated enough to be left outside the fundamental concepts of a language, but far too useful to be left outside the fundamental concepts of a realistically viable language.
Oh absolutely, but it's a pretty reasonable expectation that any contemporary language should handle that complexity for you. The entire job of a language is to make the fundamental concepts easier to work with.