I think it does depend on the kind of code you are writing. I also think it is a bit of a cop-out to say that "once satisfying the borrow checker becomes second

I think it does depend on the kind of code you are writing. I also think it is a bit of a cop-out to say that "once satisfying the borrow checker becomes second nature"... maybe I just write different code from you, but I periodically run into really thorny situations in Rust where figuring out how to satisfy the borrow checker is difficult. This happens most often in application programming, it's not something that I really run into when I'm writing libraries. Really core stuff is nice to write in Rust. Parsers, core algorithms, that kind of thing. However, I write a lot of code in Go that does stuff like glue together libraries, call APIs, etc. That stuff is really nice to use in Go. I'd also say that when I need to use a library in Rust, it's a coin-flip whether the library has a straightforward interface, or whether it is some monster with tons of template parameters, or maybe even a bunch of macro rules that you are supposed to use. Go libraries tend to be much simpler to use than Rust libraries.