Your list of common features is a bit too broad. For instance a common sentiment among game programmers is "STL is shit, you better don't touch it at all".
What's the reasoning? I haven't regularly used c++ for ~8 years, but I know the basics. I thought the downside to STL was increased executable size? If there are no generic constraints I can imagine issues popping up; effectively using generics in .NET often means using a non-generic abstract base class, building the generic class on top of that, and then constraining the generic type to the abstract class. A pain compared to Java, where you have runtime type erasure, but worth it IMO for the better reflection. I figure there's some similar quirk/gotcha in c++?
I guess the main gripe is performance. Using STL containers involves lots of implicit heap allocations and copying things around (this last thing should have improved after the introduction of move semantics, does anyone have any numbers on that?). Most of the times performance is perfectly acceptable but a few cases when it is not + inertia can give rise to this anti-STL sentiment.
