I'm not missing anything, I'm responding to a specific claim--that libraries allow C to compensate for missing language features. This is patently false irrespective of the merits of the features in question.
That said, I think your entire criteria for determining whether a language or feature is good boils down to its intuitiveness to experienced C programmers, which seems like a particularly poor, subjective criteria and it probably doesn't actually even hold for C considering all of the security issues and undefined behaviors that are introduced by and continue to surprise experienced C programmers.
For my money, closures, pattern matching, and templates (not any implementation in particular) are easy enough to reason about and much better than the corresponding bugs they address, but to each his own.
That said, I think your entire criteria for determining whether a language or feature is good boils down to its intuitiveness to experienced C programmers, which seems like a particularly poor, subjective criteria and it probably doesn't actually even hold for C considering all of the security issues and undefined behaviors that are introduced by and continue to surprise experienced C programmers.
For my money, closures, pattern matching, and templates (not any implementation in particular) are easy enough to reason about and much better than the corresponding bugs they address, but to each his own.