[psykotic]

Not sure what time scale you had in mind with "many many years" but the commercial third-party extension Visual Assist has been the only serious option for robust and scalable C++ code navigation (and related features) in Visual Studio since the late 1990s, early 2000s until the present day. Visual Studio's built-in Intellisense has been trying to play catch up (and has somewhat closed the gap), not the other way around. There were also widely used products like Source Insight focusing on offline whole-program code analysis and navigation, but they weren't really designed for integrated development.

That said, your thesis about the relative difficulty of doing this for C++ vs Java seems hard to argue against, and the rapid, continuous growth in C++'s surface area and complexity since C++11 surely hasn't helped.