I agree about C needing memory management and exceptions. That's why I said I liked C++ when that's all there was. Classes were nice sumyntactic sugar.
But the language jumped the shark starting with C++0x
C++0x adds nothing you are obligated to use, though. No sharks have been jumped unless you choose to strap on some skis and rent a boat. (Meanwhile, with move semantics and unique_ptrs, C++14 is actually way nicer as far as memory management goes than that 2000-era C++ was.)