Funnily enough, I was thinking almost exactly the same thing, the point being that unless you have spent the last 20 or so years growing up with C++ you don't really stand much chance of understanding it, there is just so damn much of it. So many ways to skin the badger.
There is a C++ library called Boost http://www.boost.org/ which is sneaking its way into our software. I am not sure I approve.
Perhaps it is time to have a 3rd go at an object oriented language expanding C and in harmony with it. Certainly Objective C looks pretty unpleasant. I wonder what objectives A and B were, perhaps they should have tried harder with them. But the trouble with such thoughts are that one is not going to do it, so one is stuck with what's out there. It is what I do, but maybe I need to go up (Ruby?), down (C - there is an O'Reilly book called '21st Century C' which I have bought (with a big discount) but not yet downloaded. Or sideways (Javascript).
Hmm.