I think the STL may have been the worst thing to have happened to C++. It could have been so much nicer if something like Qt (the core part) was adopted instead.
If Qt is anything like wxWidgets, wxWidgets reuses the STL for its container types, basically providing a thin wrapper over the STL (or it can do with a build switch).
I myself find the STL very useful, so I am genuinely interested in which bits of the STL you wish were more Qt-like? Do you mean the GUI bits of it or something?
Qt doesn't reuse the STL container types, it provides its own - which I find much more pleasant to work with than their STL counterparts. The STL puts a lot of effort into providing types of flexibility that are irrelevant or useless to me (e.g. allocators) and doesn't provide lots of simple things that I need every day (e.g. an indexOf method for std::vector, a contains method for std::set, or a toUpper/toLower method for std::string).
Regarding iOS and Android, the attempts at getting C++ on them (particularly Android) are brave but I think for normal apps (not OpenGL or games), developers are probably better using Java. Like you, I too am writing for the Big 3 normal desktop OSes, with sporadic Android development and iOS tinkerings, necessitating learning new languages.
I think opinions on that greatly vary. I for one find a majority of what is in STL very well-designed and very usable.
But if you'll indulge me for a moment, consider how you'd convert a string to uppercase using the STL vs using Qt. The STL code (taken from http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/transform) looks like this:
std::string tmp = s;
std::transform(tmp.begin(), tmp.end(), tmp.begin(), std::ptr_fun<int, int>(std::toupper));
return tmp;
The equivalent Qt code looks like:
return s.toUpper();
By the way if there's a simpler way to do that using the STL, I'd love to hear about it.
transform(begin(tmp), end(tmp), begin(tmp), [] (char c) { return toupper(c); });
It is also trivial to write a mylib::transform_in_place() that cuts down on the noise with a one-line function.
And yes it's trivial to wrap this in a function, but in my opinion it really shouldn't be necessary. It's such a simple and common-place operation, why isn't it in the standard library?
just a sidenote - this is exactly the opposite of the way of thinking the STL promotes: in STL terms, you do want a generic operation on an arbitrary collection of anything that happens be compatible with toupper. Shouldn't even be a char, let the compiler figure that out. And as it turns out, std::string happens to fit in nicely.
Edit: I hope that doesn't sound too combative - I'm just trying to explain myself, not saying that you're wrong.
from this single example I could say 'STL isn't bloated and contains just the things necessary while leaving plenty of room for extending. That is just the way it was designed' (And extending it is something I do regularly, resulting in a header-only library with tons of small helper functions containing something like noted in the other comments 'transform_inplace' and 'to_upper' which is implemented using the former. Also the resusability of most of these shouldn't be underestimated.) - but for this case I sort of agree that toUpper could have been a member of string becasue it's pretty basic and that if you work with strings regularly QString is nicer from the start as you don't need extra functions. But of course that opens the road to others saying that if toUpper is there, then why shouldn't x and y and z be there.. Never-ending :P. Which is also probably why the STL is the way it is.