> I know I could do C++, and you could argue that's better, but I find C++ to be exceptionally irritating to use. Every time I've used C++ I get people telling me I'm using it "wrong", sometimes in contradictory ways. Sometimes I should use a "friend" function, sometimes "friend functions are evil". Sometimes multiple inheritance is fine, sometimes it should be avoided like the plague. Sometimes you should "obviously" use operator overloading, sometimes you should avoid it because it's confusing because you don't know which functions are being called.

That is because you are looking at Design in C++ wrong. Language features and low-level abstractions are just mechanisms. You have to put them into a coherent framework for modeling a problem domain via commonality & variability analysis (aka domain engineering) onto a solution domain consisting of language features, idioms and patterns.

For a very good explanation, see the classic book, Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ by James Coplien.

The above can also be found in his PhD thesis Multi-Paradigm Design available in pdf form here - https://tobeagile.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/CoplienThes...