Absolutely - as with so many large open source projects, the maintainers and community are (rightfully) going to be sceptical of any newcomers.

This leaves only three options:

1. start contributing to the project slowly, try to get into their ranks, participate in conversation, and hope that you share the same vision

2. fork it and learn the codebase by yourself

3. write your own

Out of those, given the obviously conscious choice to go with Rust, and the ambitious goals, the third option is the only one that makes sense.