While you have a point about C++, it's that exact reason that I love the language so much, you can certainly brand your code so to speak. It's a very expressive, and unforgiving language.
STL is great tho' I rarely use it unless it makes total sense to, it's a lovely lib of generic tools. Although I was taught C++ and STL by a Chinese lecturer, whom I could barely understand, she kept babling about Jawa's, and C puh puh. So it was pretty much a figure it out yourself thing, she was helpful in answering some questions for me which were to do with compiler optermisations.