Parsing JSON in Java was one of my worst programming experiences, so I have to agree with you here.
But in Rust, using the `rustc-serialize` library (and Serde, but I haven't tried that yet), parsing and writing JSON is really pretty painless. The really nice part is that you can declare the structure of your JSON data as a completely normal Rust struct (just with a derive annotation that makes it Encodable and/or Decodable), and with a single function call turn an instance of that struct into a JSON string. And in reverse, you can just parse() a string and it will return either an instance of your struct or an informative error if the JSON is malformed or doesn't match your structure. Makes JSON really easy to work with.