I've been programming professionally for a similar length of time (mostly c++) and the answer is trivially obvious to me. c++ is an incredibly unproductive language to use; you spend most of your time doing the job of the compiler (header file dependency management, making sure header only get included once, putting your inlines in the right place to stop compile times being measured in hours, wrangling the linker to achieve a less than 5 minute link time). When you're not doing all that, you spend the rest of it looking at pages of incomprehensible template compile errors, when all you did wrong was something simple.

Higher level languages let you get your job done in half the time, with less stress and they compile so much quicker it isn't funny. Sure, if you're building some low level, performance critical system, then write a c++ module for it, but the majority of code in any project is not performance critical.

I've never looked back.