C++ innovates often first and adapts it into mainstream. And its kind of a swiss-army knife. You don't need to use and learn everything, just pick what you need. Unless you need to get into an old existing code base...

Just an idea: The language could be divided into multiple standard levels, where each level has more features and functionality. It would be essentially a "restricted", "standard" and "full" version of the language, where full is basically what it is now and the others are constrained versions with less functionality (no multiple inheritance and what not rules). But at this point, if you don't use the language in its full, why bother with it at all? Just thinking a bit...