[oflannabhra]

I'll be honest, I don't understand enough about ownership models, or advanced language design to answer this incredibly well.

Chris Lattner commented on this almost directly during an interview [0]:

>The promise, the dream, is to instead say, "Hey, if you are a sufficiently advanced programmer and you know how this stuff works, we can give you a new option. Instead of dropping down to unsafe constructs, you can actually just use more static type information annotations in your code.”

And, in general, Swift has been designed with progressive disclosure as a primary philosophy.

[0] -http://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript/#rustme...