I've only been doing C++ since the 2011 standard, but my sense of the language's evolution over time sort of matches yours. If you bother to learn the most comp

I've only been doing C++ since the 2011 standard, but my sense of the language's evolution over time sort of matches yours. If you bother to learn the most complex, least-obvious, newest way to do something, the language has gotten safer, more functional, and more powerful. You're way more productive using the container-agnostic `std::find()` than rolling your own version of it, as you might in other languages. BUT I wouldn't say simpler. Do you slather `noexcept` on every method you write and turn every `const` to `constexpr`? :p Some advocate for that, and the have-a-new-keyword-for-something-that-should-actually-be-the-default-(but-of-course-the-defaults-will-never-not-be-backwards-here-because-we-got-them-wrong-way-back-and-too-much-existing-code-will-break-if-we-change-them) game is getting a little crazy for me.