You're not alone in finding the syntax awkward and ugly. :)

Rust's promise of lifetime management that can (with help from the programmer) be guaranteed correct is very appealing to me, but that feature alone is not enough to justify excessive code complexity or bad ergonomics.

IMO any security benefits from the increased memory safety are immediately nullified by the security nightmare that is hundreds of statically compiled dependencies…

Rust undermines itself in another way, too: A systems programming language that's difficult to use encourages switching off the safety features when they get in the way. That's frowned upon by the community, but the incentive is there, so it happens nevertheless. The result: overly complex software that's annoying to write/maintain and doesn't always deliver on the language's defining promise.

And then there's the fact that not all dangerous bugs are solved by memory safety. It's no panacea.

I guess I’ll keep waiting on the sidelines and see how the standard lib and dependency culture evolves.

If you're interested in something that improves on C++, you might have a look at D. The basic syntax is similar, the advanced syntax is better, it offers memory safety tools less burdensome than Rust's, and has an optional garbage collector. I find the standard library a bit rough, but an improved next edition is in progress. The dependency management tool (Dub) supports not only libraries from a community repo, but also OS-provided libs, git repos, and plain old directories. After using it actively for a month or so, I feel the language itself is sane, and the maintainers seem to be making good decisions about polishing it up in future versions.