I was going to disagree with you by saying that those layers are there for a reason; and they are there for a reason, mainly backwards compatibility. But thinking a bit more, I have to agree with you that still, those layers are the problem with C++. If you want to maintain old code, you would have to be conversant with loads of different idioms, it is as if you are maintaining multiple languages, starting from C and going on to the latest C++.

To write new code, C++ can be very clean, and C++11 is a huge step in the right direction for this. But to maintain code, especially code written by someone else, C++ can be a little bit hard. And it can never be easier than maintaining C code, because maintaining C code is a subset of maintaining C++ code.