... graduated to C++, which I loved as a language that supports Object Oriented Design, which I am a firm believer in (although a big skeptic at the beginning 
A few years ago I needed to develop a tool application quickly. There was no time budget to do this, I had to steal hours here and there. I dove into to C# thinking that performance would not be an issue and that I could get something going quicker than C++. Do I have to add that I was skeptical of C# in the beginning too?
It didn't take long to make a convert out of me. Between not having to worry about memory management, not having to deal with pointers (not a big deal but an occassional source of issues), just an overall clean implementation and the .NET Framework that does all the simple and some of the hard stuff no muss no fuss - I am basically about 30% more productive using C# than C++. It's not that the things you don't have to do in C# are hard to do, but they take time and if you make a mistake maybe a lot of time.
BTW that tool I developed years ago is still being used by scads of developers and QA
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