Can you share what aspects of the design you (and Stroustroup) aren't happy with? Stroustroup has a tendency of being proven right, with 1-3 decade lag.
But in fairness, when was D&E first published? Argued for auto there, long before their acceptance. Argued for implicit template instantiation - thank god the "everything-must-be-explicit" curmudgeons were vanquished there, too.
He's got a pretty good batting average - certainly better than Herb Sutter.
Initializes lists suck mainly because of C source compat constraints, too. In fact, most things that suck in C++ came from B via C.