I agree in principle - what's the point in deciding to use Rust but turning off the borrow checker?

But on the other hand

- Rust already has unsafe mode, which is exactly for allowing you to avoid some safety checks when you've decided you are smarter than the compiler

- this really is an example where the compiler isn't smart enough, as evidenced by the fact there are plans to make it work

So another "unsafe" type of marker that watered down the borrow checker would not be totally inconsistent with the language philosophy. It should work at the block or the file level, though - surely you wouldn't want to turn that off for all your code.