"Fighting the compiler" is a common annoying stereotype, quite often quoted by people who don't even know Rust. After a while of using Rust, you no longer fight the compiler, you know how things work, you design and structure your programs with borrowck in mind from the start.

Initially coming from C++ background, e.g. I had good understanding of its ownership model with move vs copy semantics (unique_ptr vs shared_ptr), I read many Rust blogs, watched a couple of tech talks and read several chapters of the book, so everything looked super promising. I even spend reading about linear and affine type theory.

But I can testify that spending my first days with Rust was a struggle the whole way. It's probably because D had spoiled me a lot by the time I got to Rust. After some time I lost interest as Rust didn't offer anything that I was actually missing in D, while D had much to offer in the areas of things I liked.

Try to write a GUI application in Gtk-rs, or a game engine with the vector clocks array workaround, and you will see that many of us do indeed know Rust when we complain about fighting the compiler.