Fun project, but C++ sure is getting more ugly and arcane by the day. I think it's time it went away. I have great love for C but C++ has just always turned me off.
I felt this way too but was using C++ for work and have grown to like it. If you can use only the newer language features it is actually quite pleasant. You can avoid a lot of the pointer arithmetic and off by one errors that occur in C. I didn't realize how productive I was in the language until I found myself writing a small script I would normally have written in python in C++ instead.