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.