[dbaupp]

Re 1, 6 & 7, as we've discussed before: languages that do away with the () vs. [] distinction don't have the same restrictions as Rust, e.g. Scala doesn't have explicit addresses for objects, meaning `&x[i]` in Rust (get the address of the `i`th element) has no first-class equivalent in it. It isn't possible to implement this by just overloading `()` without introducing dramatic new language features.

On this note,

  They overloaded their [] operator to do two completely different things, 
  depending on whether there is an & in front.

is entirely wrong: `x[i]` is literally equivalent to `x.index(i)` or `x.index_mut(i)` depending on mutability, so the `&x[i]` form is the same as `&x.index(i)`, and `&` is a no-op. There's no special magic other than a slightly subtle desugaring.

No Rust dev is proud that there's no overloading... that sentence doesn't even make sense, as every operator can be overloaded, including the () call syntax.

Now I agree that there's often room for improvement in designs, but hammering on a relatively minor syntactic point (especially one that follows many, many other languages) for months seemingly without understanding the current design and the reasons for it is quite tiresome.