For the most part, design patterns exist merely to fix the lack of a simpler lambda construct in the language. They more often than not add complexity rather than remove it.
The biggest balls of spaghetti code I've ever seen we're always OOP with design patterns. I've seen far more clean C codebases than Java or C++ ones.
Java and C++ are often found in huge, legacy, or enterprise oriented code bases.
The are plenty of ways to use the abstractions in Java and C++ to write nice code. Just like it is possible to find a Scala or Clojure code base that went crazy with the usage of "cutting edge" features and abstractions in those languages.
And at least with Java, your IDE will always be able to navigate the code effectively.
What I'm saying is that it takes more discipline to cleanly use Java or C++ than it does to use Haskell or Clojure. For the simple reason that most of the abstractions provided by the former languages add to the program's complexity rather than remove it.
There's an excellent explanation by Rich Hickey in Simple Made Easy: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
However I would argue against the STL being well thought out. Every single large-scale C++ project I've worked on threw it out the window before even staring out. Our current project already takes an hour and a half to compile without parallel builds and barely uses templates at all.
I still prefer plain old C to C++ most of the time.