> Yet software developed in C, with all of the foibles of its string routines, has been sold and running for years with trillions of USD is total sales.

Even with the premise that sales of software is a good metric for analyzing design of the language (which I think is arguable at best), we don't know that even more money might have been made with better strings in C. You coming justify pretty much anything with that argument. MongoDB (which indicentally is on C++ and presumably makes plenty of use of std::string) made millions of dollars despite having the bug you mention, so why bother fixing it?