In what way? It's very C-like in its basic syntactic structure, just more regular.

I am not against Rust. Rust has some great ideas and intent. I just feel they should have created simpler syntax. A more complex and unusual syntax doesn't have any real benefits IMO.

What exactly is the problem with the example you linked to?

It still seems bizarre to me that a purely type-level expression is forced by an effectively non-existent term. That RFC specifically states that the main problem is that the results of variance inference are largely erased by assuming invariance. That seems like a sensible default for unused type parameters too.

It seems from the conclusion of that post that PhantomData only survived because this was the smallest change they had to make to get this all to work better, and because some of this PhantomData could be used for other analyses in the compiler (although it's not clear if better type information could have replaced these uses anyway).

Take a look at this. It isn't as simple and clear as C/C++ for example and requires significant investment in parsing and understanding the code.

It's not code rust programmers would normally write, I'm one of those programmers. I'm glad some libraries like serde,rocket and diesel are using it to generate code instead of doing run-time analysis.