I would read books like Scott Meyers' Effective Modern C++, watch cppcon talks. There's a lot of very high quality C++ content out there these days. Generally

I would read books like Scott Meyers' Effective Modern C++, watch cppcon talks. There's a lot of very high quality C++ content out there these days. Generally there's a lot of emphasis on RAII, clear ownership semantics, leveraging more of the standard library as its grown, using lambdas, avoiding shared mutable state, judicious but not excessive use of inheritance and in particular avoiding implementation inheritane, encapsulation. It's not so much a middle ground in the sense you are thinking. The people I'm talking about don't advocate developers, particularly non expert, going crazy with templates. People do that on their own. Hope that helps.