This is spot on! Comp Sci Major, graduating this year, C++ is great, iv taken courses in it but those pointer errors are frustrating even for the professors that are teaching the courses. Personally i love java with all my heart, but java is NOT for gaming and i agree that C++ has its problems but it is the clear choice for now. HOWEVER i don’t believe that it will be the game Development language of choice for professionals for too long. Java will never be a gaming language(except for strategy and some RPG, examples minecraft(original) and runescape(RS2)) that demand graphics. With in the next few unreal engines they might want to consider a newer, more powerful language that was built Object Oriented, and is very similar to the current OO languages syntactically. The only language i could think of that meets these parameters currently is a potential revision of C++ to C++17, or D. The revision of C++17 would have to be MAJOR to be more effective than D, but the C++17 would just have to come close to D, The reason why Java is so popular is because knows it(a little). Just like most people knows C++(a little at least). almost no one(including me, so far) knows D inside and out, or at lease no one in my programming community being teachers, students, etc.
Back to my main point, you nailed it! D would be great but will never happen because the knowledge demand( teachers that know it enough to teach it) doesn’t exist on a large enough scale like C++ does. That is what it comes down to. Java is 25 years old, c++ is ageless probe 30 years, D is only 8 years old. Maybe in a perfect world we could see D in 10 years but even that is a stretch looking at history.