I do think there's some good criticism of doing this, though, and so even a year later it's not clear to me it's a pure win.
I am sympathetic to the vague calls to action by Aria et al. to improve the syntax for various unsafe features. I understand why we ended up where we ended up but I think overall it was a mistake. I am not sure I agree with her specific proposals but I do agree with the general thrust of "this was the wrong place to provide syntactic salt." (my words, not hers, to be clear)
Ideally `as` wouldn't be a thing. Same deal, this is just one of those things that's the way it is due to history, but if we're ignoring all that, would be better to just not have it.
I am still undecided in the : vs = debate for structs.
I am sad that anonymous lifetimes in structs died six years ago, I think that would be a massive help.
Probably tons of other small things. Given the context and history, I think the Rust Project did a great job. All of this is very minor.