I don't love Rust because of "fast code", I love it because it leaves me less stressed and less frustrated, IOW, happier.

There's so much emphasis on the memory safety of Rust that it overshadows everything else that is awesome about it. Rust (largely) gives me the power of Haskell strong types, but with fantastic tooling and a much much richer library (if you include crates.io).

I find the difficulty of Rust overstated; much of the borrowing challenges can be avoided by cloning/copying wherever required and limiting borrowing to where that approach becomes an actual performance problem. As Python's success proves, developer productivity trumps runtime efficiency.