Yes, back in the day the goal was to provide a "batteries included" stdlib with Rust, but eventually it became obvious that good library design was hard and so

Yes, back in the day the goal was to provide a "batteries included" stdlib with Rust, but eventually it became obvious that good library design was hard and so almost all of the "batteries" (like rand, rustc_serialize, many of the collections, datetime, and more) were all offloaded to crates.io. As for cargo, what we have today is literally Rust's third package manager, after the experience with using the first two led people to conclude that they just needed to hire domain experts to design and implement it (the bundler folks).