It is inconsistent to hold those beliefs. Because "insane" implies that the Rust team made wrong decisions with the syntax, in fact so obviously wrong that no "sane" person would make them. If you acknowledge that the syntax decisions make sense, then they aren't "insane".
Meh. That's just playing semantic games. I'm using "insane" in IMHO the more common colloquial sense of "inscrutable; hard to understand; inconsistent with existing paradigms". I'm absolutely not questioning your mental health.
Nothing about the soundness of your design means that Rust isn't hard to learn, is all I'm saying. And per the freakshow all around us, it's getting harder, not easier.
I've never understood the use of the word "semantic" in the dismissive sense. Meaning is everything when parties are trying to communicate. This thread finally got to the heart of the miscommunication, and instead of celebrating you say "meh." I don't get it.
It's not inconsistent to hold the simultaneous beliefs that "trying to fix Rust's syntax would make it worse" AND "Rust's syntax is insane".
And given those beliefs, maybe adding a postfix operator to express what everyone else does with a function call was a poor call.