Boost is a technical masterpiece and very high quality C++. It's also battle tested and very reliable. I use it for my professional projects but I loathe using it. Not just the complexity, but the error messages are really hard to decipher and most IDE's autocomplete systems completely choke when using Boost. Even if I want to see how something works 'under the hood' it's almost impossible to figure out.
In the end, I came to the conclusion that it's far more productive (for me atleast) just to stick with plain C and using a 'helper' library like Apache Portable Runtime library.