I'm inclined to agree. It took me a week or two of daily usage to finally "get used" to the borrow checker. It's a bit of a paradigm shift, to be sure, but it's not insurmountable. In fact, I think learning Rust has made even my C code better, because now I'm in the habit of thinking thoroughly about ownership and the like, which is something that I did to an extent before (because you have to to write robust software without a GC), but it was never explicit and I never would've been able to articulate the rules like I can now.
That said, I still occasionally have problems where I feel like I'm doing something "dirty" or "hacky" just to satisfy the borrow checker. It's easy to program yourself into a corner and then find yourself calling `clone()` (the situation, I've been told, has gotten much better in recent releases with improvements to the borrow checker, but alas I haven't had a chance to play much with Rust in nearly a year).
Another thing that I still find difficult is dealing with multiple lifetimes in structs, to the point that I usually just say "to hell with it" and wrap everything in an `Rc<T>`. And sometimes there's simply no safe way (afaict) to do some mutation that I want to do without risking a panic at runtime (typically involving a mutable borrow and a recursive call), which leads to a deep re-thinking of some algorithm I'm trying to implement. That's not Rust's fault, though—it's a real, theoretical problem that arises in the face of mutation. In time, I'm sure there will be well-understood patterns for handling such cases.
That said, I still occasionally have problems where I feel like I'm doing something "dirty" or "hacky" just to satisfy the borrow checker. It's easy to program yourself into a corner and then find yourself calling `clone()` (the situation, I've been told, has gotten much better in recent releases with improvements to the borrow checker, but alas I haven't had a chance to play much with Rust in nearly a year).
Another thing that I still find difficult is dealing with multiple lifetimes in structs, to the point that I usually just say "to hell with it" and wrap everything in an `Rc<T>`. And sometimes there's simply no safe way (afaict) to do some mutation that I want to do without risking a panic at runtime (typically involving a mutable borrow and a recursive call), which leads to a deep re-thinking of some algorithm I'm trying to implement. That's not Rust's fault, though—it's a real, theoretical problem that arises in the face of mutation. In time, I'm sure there will be well-understood patterns for handling such cases.