People said this about Clojure and I never fully understood why. I've dabbled in Rust and while I've always loved Ruby for it's aesthetic I never had a problem with Rust. It suits the language. Feels like you're writing serious code in a serious language. Which is appropriate.
I tried to learn a bit of rust and I couldn't shake the feeling that rust is a very ugly language, like uglier than c ugly.
What makes you say this? And what is your prior language experience?
Right there is the problem. There are many programmers for whom it's their day job. Others depend on their code doing something useful and important. But they're not theoreticians, don't have advanced degrees in CS, and haven't written in a dozen languages. A new language has to be usable by them to get traction.
The Rust community, at this point, is mostly people who know several programming languages and want to try a new one. Look at the comments above from people who compare type systems in different languages and are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. Note the references to obscure languages and research papers most programmers have never heard of, let alone used or read. This is not the target market for a new language, if it is to be a success. It has to be used by people who don't debate language theory issues while the Super Bowl is on.
