I like the analogy to learning a language. The immersion is very important. I did exactly what you said. I didn't read many tutorials I just sat down and rewrote a project in Rust. I don't use lifetimes properly right now (I abuse cloning many times) but I am happy with the progress.
Another thing worth mentioning is that while being a great language Rust is still a tool. Designing the architecture, algorithms, logic of the system, refactoring are much more difficult than the language itself in my opinion.
Rust especially, thanks to the efficient hypemachine, will have the problem of people wanting to learn it but not having anywhere to apply it immediately. I actually have a similar problem with French.