It depends muchly. In general, I'd rather have a seasoned set of 'C' programmers rather than people who are unconcerned with what happens at the level of the metal.

But that's probably a personal bias, one that's been hard-earned. It's a way of leveraging the decades of mistakes made by those folks - and aid for by previous employers.

A "'C' with classes" approach is probably a good one - but I'd hate to find some subtle template or Boost bug in mid flight...

This is all IMO, but an approach like Bruce Powell Douglass "Doing Hard Time' is a pretty good way to satisfy the "systems engineer" customers for UML charts and still have rigorous development.

UML is quite the anti-pattern and Rose is kind of awful but this should be a compromise that can work. CASE tools have gone out of fashion.