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Does D not aim to fill this niche? (I suppose in terms of exposure and infrastructure, D is lacking relative to C and C++).

No, it's closer to a garbage collected Algol but with way more features.

Objective-C?

It seems that C++ really requires one to be subtle in his coding style.

Stroustrup discusses this here:

People generally master and commonly use only a subset of C++, i.e. C+.