There are undoubtedly better solutions than Rust, but they tend to allow for more developer-managed complexity rather than less! For example, one might imagine a cleaned-up variety of the GhostCell pattern, to decouple ownership- and borrow-checking from the handling of references. The principled extreme would be a language that just implements full-blown separation logic for you and lets you build up the most common patterns (including "ownership" itself) starting from that remarkably "simple" base.