Sure the C interface is clunky and the error messages can be a little hard to trace their source, but it sure beats having to write all that code from scratch. Most projects I have seen that make heavy use of OpenCV use a few C++ wrapper classes to make the usage a little smoother.
I concur. It isn't feasible to use the python opencv bindings for nontrivial tasks.
we use a c++ wrapper around opencv as well.
opencv isn't valuable for its algorithms or its api. The opencv value proposition is tied up with painstaking optimization of the inner loops of several high level operations using SIMD intrinsics.
Advances in compiler technology seem to be pointing towards generated code with similar levels of optimization especially in JIT generated code.