As someone without experience with linear types who learned Rust in the last week while porting quickcheck, I think my experience supports your claim here. In the first few days I was cursing the borrow-checker in every way imaginable. I was comfortable with everything except the pointer types and their borrowing semantics.

After a few days, the borrowing logic really started to click and I was fighting much less with the compiler. Admittedly, I still have some fogginess about some areas (particularly the borrowing/sending semantics of closures), but I understand that there's still some work left to be done on that before 1.0. But the point I want to stress here is that once the borrowing logic clicked, Rust became a reasonably simple language. Which is really important to me.

But, I now get to say that I just wrote quickcheck without manually freeing memory and without the use of a garbage collector. That's pretty damn cool if I say so myself.