I wouldn't call automatic memory management a "huge leap forward" at all. Sure it makes code a bit more concise and eliminates leaks (more or less), but it makes your code less performant and just shifts the problem away from the programmer to the VM instead. It's a leap into lazyness, if anything. It also creates problems since now people think it's OK to "new" objects within a for loop freely

You can probably tell by now that my goto language for any kind of large scale application is still C++ w/ STL for safety :). For small hacks, obviously I'd use python, js or ruby or something like that any day.