I used to write a lot of C and C++ professionally, and have long thought that C is 100 times harder than is suggested by the apparent care taken writing much of the C code we've seen.

I've also done a lot of professional Lisp, since you asked. :)

I've only done a tiny bit of Rust thus far, and am not yet ready to say it's the holy grail of systems-y software development. But Rust has enough good and interesting ideas, and what now looks like a good community process for its evolution, and I've seen enough examples of people doing good work using Rust-- that I can imagine Rust turning out very well, and I'm willing to invest, and find out. (Ideally, at some point getting paid to do so, rather than with a slow trickle of weekend projects.)

I'll acknowledge a potential conflict of interest here. Compared to C, the difficulty of Rust seems much more immediate, and harder to fake, or to naively blow past. When you have to think and learn a lot just to get nontrivial code to compile, that seems like a higher barrier to entry for new practitioners. Which means, besides the usual tech industry dynamic of always getting new keywords on one's resume, and boosting the keywords that differentiate oneself... there's the aspect of Rust simply having a better competitive moat than, say, is had by yet another slightly different Web framework. That's not an attraction for me, I don't think, but it's difficult not to realize, when we're surrounded by that dynamic. I think there are better reasons to be interested in Rust, but I'll try to look out for, and be honest with myself about, potential conflicts of interest along the way.