I had the same thoughts about SIMD code being too verbose when I wrote some, so a few months ago I tried writing a library that lets you write quasi-GLSL code in C++, so much more compact, with the ability to switch between SIMD width without having to rewrite anything at all:
https://github.com/gitdepierre/cppshader
Not sure it will ever be useful, but it was a fun pet project with some interesting problems to solve.