If you are unproductive when coding C++, you are Doing It Wrong. Good C++ code flows like water. If you are finding it complex, you have gone down a side alley, and need to get back to the wide, sunny boulevard.
I frequently sit down and write 2000 lines of C++ code, and when it compiles, it works. Aim for that.
My 2000 lines of C++ work fine just as well. C++ is unproductive when compared to other languages.
C++ can be found to be the best language for a specific class of problems. But.
Those 2000 lines of C++? If that code had been python or F# or even C# and the problem had been 'generic' enough it would likely have less lines of code and be done faster.
If that 2k lines happened to implement some numerics stuff with hard performance requirements then C++ might come up on top.
But my complaint overall is not about a short 2k line program. It's about the whole program lifetime and software complexity of a complex system.
For non-trivial programs C++ opens a whole can of worms concerning compatibility, deployment, locales, memory handling, weird bugs due to sometimes obscure lifetimes, integer sizes on different plarforms... etc etc.
I frequently sit down and write 2000 lines of C++ code, and when it compiles, it works. Aim for that.