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C++11 is also great.

What are you talking about?! The STL and Boost are bloated and ugly; and worst of all they produce the most useless, verbose, garbage compile-time errors. (Admittedly the ugliness of those errors are partly due to C++'s template implementations, and STL and Boost are far and away the best set of libraries for C++)

The problem there is the lack of adequate tooling for C++. C++ templating should have been largely fixed by having Concepts. Too bad it didn't make it into the standard.

I see little bloat in STL, although for a while I was misguided as well, and thought that STL was too bloated. It isn't. STL is quite small and quite elegant; I would not be afraid of using it.
With Boost I can agree that it's a bloated animal, but nobody says you should use Boost. It's just too big, and sometimes you need a smart pointer.
But now, C++11 really comes in and saves the day. It does make the STL more efficient, and makes you need less features of Boost. It adds the smart pointers you need in the standard, as well as threading and timing. It's quite nice, you should try it.
The errors are indeed awful; but maybe this is something that can be improved.

Vectors are nice (as are Lists) but those alone aren't good enough reasons to use C++.

One thing that's always confused me is the odd separation between the STL and language features. For example, why are Iterators an STL class rather than being a language construct, along with some syntactic sugar like a foreach statement?

One of the biggest reasons why C++ is the complicated language it is is due to the design principle they used that most of the heavy lifting be done in libraries.

The STL and TR/Boost libraries serve as a demonstration of C++ language features.

There's also the other principle of "you don't pay for what you don't use". Having library features as part of the language features could result in unwanted features being pulled into low level code. Having a separate library is a very strong signal that the inclusion of heavy weight stuff is intentional when it's in code.