To the first part: I guess it's true that if you see someone using a STL list for "just a bucket of stuff" that this is bad form. But they're general purpose doubly-linked lists and absolutely should be there in the API for situations where they're needed (i.e. something where order is important, the size is likely to be large, and you need to mutate in the middle).
The second point I think is just isomorphic to "breadth is good". A Ruby or Python programmer coming to C++ is going to avoid a lot of the mistakes of the C programmer, but will likewise miss a lot of the core ideas and generate equally pessimal code, just for different reasons.
I'm not saying C++ shouldn't have a doubly linked list. I'm saying that C programmers are trained to use linked lists. They are the first variable-length containers most programmers come into contact with and so C programmers tend to be imprinted on them like ducklings. Linked lists are a poor general purpose container.
The second point I think is just isomorphic to "breadth is good". A Ruby or Python programmer coming to C++ is going to avoid a lot of the mistakes of the C programmer, but will likewise miss a lot of the core ideas and generate equally pessimal code, just for different reasons.