From my experience of trying to learn Rust (got almost halfway through the manual and then put it on hold), I would add that having all these ways of doing the same thing is also confusing from a beginner's perspective. As a noob, I have no idea what the timeline is of when feature A was introduced that does the same thing as feature B. Also, I kept having to dig around to see if feature A added any type of improvements (other than syntactic sugar) over feature B.