> I don't particularly see what's wrong with new/delete to be honest.

No automatic de-allocation, no ownership semantics, no difference between new/new[] in the type system.

The first part of your message is just a straw man argument. Nobody is asking you to know the C++ standard, people are expecting that you understand basic things about changes that were introduced 3 years ago in the C++ standard library (and more like 7-8 years ago in boost/std::tr1), or that at least you don't complain about reading a little documentation about it. http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/unique_ptr is not 2000 pages.