Your point about unsafe pointer handling in Rust is specifically what dissuaded us from using it in an upcoming project. It really feels bad prepending all of the code that you actually care about being safe with `unsafe`.
`unsafe` before a block simply means "the following code has been manually checked for memory safety, because the compiler is unable to automatically do so". Before a function it means "this can only be called from an unsafe block, because the compiler cannot enforce the preconditions it requires to ensure memory safety". What alternative term would make you feel less bad?