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.