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I take it you haven’t seen Brainfuck yet? Rust is pretty straightforward and I was able to submit PRs fixing several bugs within an hour. I can’t write new code, but grasping what is going on is pretty easy. For a language to be “challenging” I’d say that it shouldn’t be easy to tell what is going on without knowing a bunch of language specific-ish operators (aka, Haskell).

Sure, it was my first language without a gc. It took about 80-100 hours to be comfortable with it, or roughly two work weeks.

Given its similarities to c/c++, I’d expect someone to come up to speed in a quarter of the time or less.

Rust is actually quite easy to use, that's literally one of its selling points. It's supposed to allow you to use nicer syntax than C AND also gives you guardrails to prevent you from introducing memory unsafety.

I would not say that Rust is easy to use; rather, it is hard to misuse.

The guardrails make it harder to shoot the proverbial foot, but also to get code to compile at all.

Well, at least at the beginning. One becomes used to the so-called "compiler-driven development", at which point it becomes a breeze.