[steveklabnik]

Sure, but that's an oversight of the LinkedList API (which, honestly, was almost removed from std all-together, it's not exactly a shining beacon of API design) than some sort of inherent limitation of smart pointers, which seems to be what you're saying here.

[Const-me]

I don’t think that was an oversight.

I think rust safety model prevents rust containers from returning mutable pointers to the contained items. Especially pointers to item's implementation details, like nodes of that linked lists.

And without raw pointers to items, you can’t easily compose containers to make higher-level data structures from them.

[steveklabnik]

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/vec/struct.Vec.html#met...

(That is, many data structure _do_ do this, and you _can_ do it. It is an oversight.)