Five holes in a star shape look better than four holes in a cross shape in my eyes.
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I think people should spend more time and efforts on stabilizing the ABI and making 'asm!()' stable, rather than polishing the logo.
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Those are two very different skill sets. I doubt either one would block work on the other.
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I agree. An ABI would be fantastic. 
. I just don't feel that there's an easy way to get started with that. 
I agree. I guess my frustration is with the perpetual lack of progress in the areas I mentioned, which in my opinion are far more important.
Also, note that these problems are not unique to Rust. Other languages have dealt with, and are dealing with them now. For example, GCC, Clang with LLVM seem to manage OK, even if their solution isn't perfect.
Perhaps the benefits of waiting forever for a perfect solution aren't as great as those of settling down on something simply acceptable.
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It's highly unlikely that most people would care what you think they should be doing with their time.
It is like this: there are issues that lower the appeal of Rust to the wider community, and hurt Rust's adoption rate. For people who do care to see Rust improving and gaining wider acceptance, it should make sense to pay attention to those issues. And perhaps, a reminder of where the real obstacles to adoption are (hint: it's not the logo), might help them prioritize their efforts better.
For those "with idle hands" who merely look for ways to amuse themselves - absolutely, they wouldn't care what I may think about it. Not would I care for them to care.
Hey, I'm trying to improve Rust with non programmer skills, because most programmers won't see the need for improvement of a logo. I have already contributed to the Rust community by coding, but there's plenty of other people capable of doing that, in contrast to designing stuff, which is probably less common among programmers. 
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Yes, you are correct - graphical design skills appear to be rather less common. It's not only that most of the programmers won't see the need for the logo improvement, they probably won't do a stunning good job there. So, no offense meant to good graphics designers 
But, as I said before, I was venting my frustration with the fact that while there's definitely/obviously more of those who can design code than of those who can design graphics (well ) - issues that appear to be critical for usability and adoption into wider ecosystems, show little to no progress. Add if people chose to address easier issues because, well, it's (relatively) easy, rather than dealing with more complicated ones that nonetheless cannot be kicked down the road forever.
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I think it's really cool of you to volunteer your time on this.
What I think I see from these suggestions is that I really like the current Rust logo. Yes, it is outside of the narrow window of ordinary design space that we're used to from Silicon Valley tech companies, but that's a good thing overall. The design space for logos has gotten way too small, and all logos look the same now. Rust's logo really pops.
The ones you did where it's still a gear but it has fewer spokes - those I like more! Particularly the first one that is sharp and toothy. Rust is a serious industrial tool and deserves to have a spiky logo.
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IMO, this one, suggested by @johannesvollmer, is the best one so far:
I would simplify the R though, it resembles B too much.
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Can we just keep the logo as it is?
It has character. It does not look like a no parking notice or directions to the toilet as seen in the OP here. It does not look like it's been designed by a professional logo designer and hence the same as everything else.
Cut the bike shedding. Just keep what there is.
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I'm not sure why they named it "Rust". This language reminds me more of a millipede (the head is the struct and the rings are added traits). It remember me a millipede because it is a "trait oriented language". And we can add as many traits as we want.
So a millipede is my proposal.
well it's named after a "rust", a fungus, because fungi are robust, parallel and distributed !
(no, i don't know how that relates to the gear logo, as far as i know the fungi eat plants, not gears)
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Have you never seen rust eating iron and steel. Surly you have.
That rusty gear gear logo conjures up great things. Memories of the glory days of the industrial revolution, when we were building huge iron steam engines, locomotives, railways, bridges, ships, power stations. They were massive, powerful, strong and very enduring. A lot of that stuff was rusting hulks around the place when I was a kid. The rusty gear is very symbolic of industrial strength.
Rust never sleeps. It eats iron and steel. But paradoxically it can also form a protective skin that prevents further corrosion and failure.
Iron and oxygen are not stable together. Combined as rust they reach stability.
Anyway, if you change the Rust gear logo to some modern professional logo designer style you totally lose that industrial ambiance of the thing. Becoming bland, meaningless and un-memorable, just another random logo squiggle, as the examples above demonstrate.
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I agree with @jjpe, the current logo is easy to recognize and I personally like it. If any changes were to be made I would rather think in terms of evolving the current one carefully rather than making too drastic changes.
Regarding scaled down versions, I had an idea of using outlines instead of a "filled" version (sorry for the lack of a better vocabulary, I'm not a designer), however, turns out a little searching lead me to a version that looks like this and I think it looks pretty nice even when scaled down pretty small:
Maybe skip the "bolt holes" in the scaled down version though as that makes it look a bit too "busy".
(Clipped from this article: How to Choose a Technology Stack for Your Startup)
There's a trend to modernize logos by switching from a serif font to sans-serif, dropping all ornaments, and keeping only essential shapes.
For Rust that works great! It makes the logo legible at very small sizes, and it's even in Unicode already: ®
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Logos had to be low res in the days of silk-screen printing for technical reasons but that no longer applies today. The logo at the top of this page, while being small, is perfectly fine.
If you must simplify, get rid of the pentagram of holes and reduce the number of teeth to, say, thirteen.
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