[pcwalton]

What, specifically, would you want to have Rust do instead regarding lifetimes?

It sounds like you don't want memory safety without garbage collection, based on your last paragraph, and that's totally fine! My use cases aren't necessarily your use cases, and I don't want to claim that everyone who truly doesn't care about zero-overhead memory safety is wrong. But I think it's defensible that memory safety is an important feature for many projects (for example, the ones I work on) in 2015, even if it results in an additional learning curve. The disease we're trying to cure is a never-ending stream of security vulnerabilities and crashes in systems code, and none of the attempts to solve the problem that have existed so far have worked.