I've been writing c++ on and off since Visual Studio 6. I would be glad to see it move faster. I don't have to learn all esoteric things - I can pick and use parts which I like, such as auto, for-each, smartptr, lambdas and so on. There was a version 2003 and then C++11. Almost a decade later. How can that possibly be too fast?

I thought maybe you're thinking of TR1 (2007). I think VS2008 was the first one with support for that. It was kind of a preview of what was to come in C++11 back when it was popularly called C++0x.