The bigger issue is that your course professor picked a language that's still pretty new and under development. To quote the Rust website "Rust is a work-in-progress and may do anything it likes up to and including eating your laundry".

> Rust just seems like it requires a much deeper knowledge of programming theory in general for one to use it effectively

I mean it's on the lower end of language spectrum so yes, it requires more knowledge than say Python but it's not much more than say C.

> people like me would rather just write it in Python

Rust is not supposed to replace Python, it's supposed to replace C/C++/Ada.