Yes.

The biggest innovation of Rust is bringing some of the good ideas from functional programming to low level programming. I'd also say that partially exposing data flow analysis to a proframmer is new.

Rust package management is quite good, and also not by any means an invention.

I am still not a fan of all the ugly macro programming systems and verbose syntax in the language.

Macros in Rust are really ergonomically terrible. Zig's approach here is way better.

The language I really want is somewhere inbetween those two languages.

The borrow checker in Rust is frankly novel. Cyclone had something somewhat similar, but not the same.

The broader ML-like type system in Rust is not novel, but the integration of the borrow checker -- and its move semantics more broadly -- with it... that form honestly is an innovation. And one I'd have a hard time living without at this point.

And also one I'd like to see in more languages! Especially a simpler one, closer to C.

Cyclone would be the closest to that I guess. RIP.

True! the borrow checker is a special thing. This is what i mean when i say "explicit data flow analysis".

In a way this is compiler internals exposed to a programmer.