Basically I ask you to give examples to showcase how the standard library handles flexible edge cases with high quality, and when I point out how the example you gave is fundamentally flawed your counter argument is that for your own example, and you could have picked anything: the standard is defective and goes against common sense, it takes 100 lines of code and an hour to implement a trivial example to showcase how flexible it is, it has made assumptions that it probably shouldn't have in hindsight, and a host of other reasons that basically showcase that the standard library isn't nearly as flexible or high quality as you made it out to be.
It was your example to give and it turns out that just providing a basic example requires all this complexity, exposes all these defects, isn't standard compliant and not portable across compilers.
You are certainly welcome to your opinion and I doubt either of us are going to convince one another at this point... but I am fairly confident most sensible people would not look at the example you chose to showcase and think "Wow, what a flexible and powerful API the standard library provides, very high quality." They will come away thinking that your example is everything wrong with C++; it's convoluted, error prone, and incredibly fragile.
It was your example to give and it turns out that just providing a basic example requires all this complexity, exposes all these defects, isn't standard compliant and not portable across compilers.
You are certainly welcome to your opinion and I doubt either of us are going to convince one another at this point... but I am fairly confident most sensible people would not look at the example you chose to showcase and think "Wow, what a flexible and powerful API the standard library provides, very high quality." They will come away thinking that your example is everything wrong with C++; it's convoluted, error prone, and incredibly fragile.