[rcxdude]

Rust is not particularly adventerous as far as PL theory is concerned: all of the ideas in it are actually quite old (just newer than the ideas in established languages, like C). It's fundamentally quite pragmatic and you see that in most of the decisions it makes. I also don't agree that minimal features is necessary for success (even though it may be a desireable attribute of a language). Many extremely successful languages have piled on features over time, some in a far less reasoned way than rust (C actually a big outlier in how slowly it has evolved: C++, Java, C#, python, perl, PHP, etc are all large languages, with complexity in terms of number of features similar to Rust).