I disagree. You should look at OCaml (and Standard ML, though the eqtypes in SML are a botch): generics are dead simple there. Much simpler than Go interfaces, in fact.

Sure, there's always "one more thing" you could add, but that's always true for anything in any language. Slippery slope is a fallacy for this reason.

> or else you force people to use dynamic checks/allocations/casts that reduce your type-safety and bog the code down relative to the "optimal" design

Which is what happens even more if you don't have generics!

A language designer can provide let polymorphism, refuse to add more, and call it a day.

> (higher) order/kinded types,

This is orthogonal to parametric polymorphism. Higher-kinded types are problematic for inference, and the way Haskell has implemented them has unfortunate consequences for modularity.

> where clauses,

This is just syntactic sugar. (FWIW, what I think Rust needs is better inference, rather than ways to make type signatures less verbose.)

> dependent types,

This is unrelated to parametric polymorphism.

> specialization

This is antithetical to parametric polymorphism.

> or else you force people to use dynamic checks/allocations/casts that reduce your type-safety and bog the code down relative to the "optimal" design.

Standard ML doesn't have dynamic checks or unsafe casts, and I don't find myself longing for them.