
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
The problem is that lot's of compilers still aren't good enough to handle the STL. You're okay if you're working on something with a port of g++, but there are still embedded systems where you can't choose the compiler. Also, there are a huge legion of C and C++ programmers who still aren't comfortable with the STL, and don't allow modern techniques in their projects.