Great!

I'd rather view this as a design decision instead of just ideological purity - afterall, if you are trying to design a safe systems language, you have to limit the unsafeness to strictly necessary points. If you are trying to argue that safeness and soundness are not important, Rust might not be a proper fit for your needs.

I guess Rust is not trying to be the glorious successor of C++ or a new C++ with aesthetic improvements - as others like D did - but it's trying to be something different. And this might be the key point of its success.