Patrick already got into the subjectivity aspect here, so I'll leave that subthread there.

  > Rust eschews readability by erring on the side of terseness

We actually used to be more terse, then slowly expanded things until it felt right. At one point in time, "return" was "ret".

  > I can't understand who thought using ' was a great idea.

We had a lot of discussion about this before 1.0, and nobody was able to come up with a proposal that was clearly better.

  > I wish more time was spent on the visual aspect of a language.

We did spend a lot of time on this, and are continuing to. For example, the rustfmt team is just getting going, to nail down the last bit of style guidelines. Rust has had many different syntaxes over the years, and this is what we arrived at. See that other thread on subjectivity; I actually really like the "C with a bit of ML sprinkled in" that we arrived at. The only thing I don't like at all is the turbofish, ::<>, but I understand why it exists, it's almost never required, and it at least has a fun name to take some of the edge off. That said, I've also gotten less and less opinionated about syntax over time; semantics is far more interesting. As long as everything is consistent, I don't care as much about the specific details.