Aspects of language design that are way more important are: the semantics, including type system, memory model, concurrency model, module system and so on; tooling; performance; FFI and OS interface; and lots of other things.
The reason these things matter more than surface-level syntax stuff is that they change what kinds of problems you can solve with the language, and what tradeoffs you’ll accept if you use it.
Of course, hyperpalatable syntax can be a factor in a language’s success, like Python. But at this point it’s Python’s ecosystem that perpetuates its dominance, and if they made some syntax changes it wouldn’t change that by much.
>Aspects of language design that are way more important are: the semantics, including type system, memory model, concurrency model, module system and so on; tooling; performance; FFI and OS interface; and lots of other things.
D have pretty much all of aspects of your main concerns and being much better than Rust and Go [1].
[1] Language Plasticity is More Important Than Ever:
https://blog.dlang.org/2026/08/10/language-plasticity-is-mor...
Not that matters too much, given AI based programming tooling going forward.