In my experience the difficulty of picking up Rust is most pronounced for people experienced in other languages that have common design patterns that are discou

In my experience the difficulty of picking up Rust is most pronounced for people experienced in other languages that have common design patterns that are discouraged or made impossible by Rust. It's harder to unlearn something that from your point of view works (even if it had hidden or clear drawbacks) when you're also having to learn other things simultaneously. Also, I feel the biggest hurdle Rust has for experienced developers from other languages is that Rust makes some ineficient code visible, but the way of optimizing it requires delving into more advanced parts of the language, frustrating people when they are most "vulnerable". This is where the common piece of advice for people starting with rust "just clone for now and don't think about it" comes from: get used to the language first and deal with borrowing on its own at a later time. But all of this frustrating learning curve comes to fruition later in when writing code because the experience is closer to pair programming with the compiler rather than trying things in a vacuum on your own.