Unfortunately Stepanov and the STL are widely misunderstood. Stepanov core contributions is the set of concepts underlying the STL and the iterator model for generic programming. The set of algorithms and datastructures in the STL was only supposed to be a beginning, was never supposed to be a finished collection. Unfortunately many, if not most treat it that way.

But if you look beyond, you can find a whole world that extend the stl. If you are not happy, say, with unordered_map, you can find more or less drop in replacements that use the same iterator based interface, preserve value semantics and use the a common language to describe iterator and reference invalidation.

Regarding your specific use case, if you want intrusive lists you can use boost.intrusive which provides containers with STL semantics except it leaves ownership of the nodes to the user. The containers do not even need to be lists: you can put the same node in multiple lists linked list, binary trees (multiple flavors), and hash maps (although this is not fully intrusive) at the same time.

These days I don't generally need boost much, but I still reach for boost.intrusive quite often.