While I'm new to rust, and have just been dabbling in C -- as another comment mentions here: you really have to deal with the borrowing in C as well (and the compiling/optimization). If you don't deal with in C (without any real language support) -- you'll get bugs. If you're very lucky, and made a great effort in turning on warnings[1] -- you'll be aware of those bugs. Most likely you won't.
[1] See eg: https://github.com/incrediblesound/Graph-Reply/commit/929e57... for a little bit about C and warnings.
3 is certainly a problem, but personally I found enough materials to learn Rust even for now. However more "friendly" resources would be definitely welcome.