I wonder if it would help if you stated what programming languages you have been using in that time?
I get the impression that those who have experience of languages like C, C++, even assembler, get the idea of Rust more easily. They have already spent years chasing bugs caused by memory usage errors, null pointers, data races in threaded code etc. They appreciate how Rust is helping with all those issues.
On the other hand there seem to people people around who are quite at home with "functional programming" who seem to handle that aspect of Rust with ease.
I'm not sure how someone whose only experience is a scripting language like Javascript, Python, Java, etc would would feel about it.