While I agree with much of your response I specifically disagree with the notion that a single person on the outside cannot identify a problem with the decision

While I agree with much of your response I specifically disagree with the notion that a single person on the outside cannot identify a problem with the decision making of an insular group. Many people in microsoft seem to be thoroughly stuck in the microsoft way of doing things even when not ideal. How many COM objects did they for years after COM was dead? For how long did they ignore the concept of an AST during parsing of C++? Even in msvc2015 rev 3 you can't reliably turn this feature on for even a moderately sized codebase, but it is the default for GCC and Clang and has been for years. There might be a lot of smart people as microsoft, but they are often isolated from cutting edge ideas or squashed by bureaucracy. I even really like C++, but perhaps for a security product that isn't particularly performance sensitive something else would have been better. It doesn't seem to run all the time like other AV products and just at the boundaries where information can get in and out this means it does a lot less work and has looser performance constraints, perhaps they could have used C# another in house languages.