Now, this is true in many senses, as it's inherently how static analysis works, but I've also had many experiences where someone joins one of our IRC channels, shows some code and says "hey the borrow checker won't let me do this thing that's totally safe" and then I or someone else replies "well, what about this?" to which the answer is "...... oh. yeah." This is virtually almost always from C++ programmers.

It's hard to escape the mindset of languages we're used to!

> At the same time a lot of the error messages are very cryptic

You should file bugs! We care deeply about the legibility of error messages, and the whole --explain system is there to try and go above and beyond.