You know, I have a love/hate relationship with C kind of like what you described. In general I hate how hard it is to use and how easy it is to make gigantic mistakes in it. But on the other hand it's so raw and pure that it makes it a fun challenge. Recently I decided to write a SNES-era video game in C using SDL2, so we'll see how that goes. Maybe my mind will change as I make progress on that front.
Part of my projects, I write C for embedded devices. It's actually not so hard if you adopt common idioms for doing things. Most of the puzzle type problems go out of their way to cause problems. Things like the MISRA C coding standard will keep you out of most trouble, though I ignore some of their advice.
