I don't disagree with either of your points, but when I learned Rust, those points about borrow-checker vs graphs in the cycle were entirely clear after looking

I don't disagree with either of your points, but when I learned Rust, those points about borrow-checker vs graphs in the cycle were entirely clear after looking at the first few tutorial lessons on the borrow-checker. Maybe day 2 of learning Rust for me. And coming from C++, Rc is not such a foreign concept compared to smart pointers. Coming from C it might be a bit more of a foreign concept I'll admit.