I had a similar problem with the type system in Haskell. I'd look at Haskell code and it was obtuse to me. Even reading books, it was hard for me to understand some stuff until I started writing code... but writing code was difficult because I didn't understand it.
For me the key was just doing toy problems over and over again. Without understanding the idioms, it's hard to dive in and write something real. I think Rust is approachable if you take it like that (or at least it was when I looked at it about 2 years ago).
I do not agree that Rust's challenges are the same challenges with other programming languages. Because Rust will not let you even play with the langauge unless you understand how to write safe programs (which is a concept that is defined in Rust). So there's a whole bootstrapping problem of "how the hell do I play with this thing to understand it if I can't play with it until I understand it fully". C, C++, Python, Go -- none of them have this issue. They will let you write bad code and won't stop you from running it (which I admit is not a good thing, I'm just saying that Rust's strengths are not without their downfalls).