Delphi and VB6 did leave a bad taste in my mouth, unless you are only talking the IDE, and Delphi's was better until they rewrote in C++, after Bill wooed Borland's entire team over to .net and Visual Studio.
There are still some things where C++ is a natural choice, but designing standard CRUD /OO applications is no longer one of them.
VB, Delphi, any one remember Gupta gained their market share because simple things were painful to do in the C++ environments.

I'm also sure there is no sensible comparison in terms of efficient application development between managed and unmanaged C++ That's like comparing VB6 and VB.Net. Any apparent commonality is misleading.