I really like the Qt syntax. It's well though out, readable, I can overlook it without years of study and it has a good documentation. I think it helps to not think about it as C++ at all, because it isn't really. It's a syntax subset of C++ with a few extensions and it's own standard library that happens to use a C++ compiler somewhere down the toolchain.

I don't see the issue with the object hierarchies either. You have your QObject and QWidget classes that are important and then all the stuff that builds on that. Not that complicated really once you get into it.

The UTF-16 thing is ugly, yea, but I did never see a practical issue with it.