The reason I like and recommend Rust is the number of decisions it gets right which are completely orthogonal to the borrow checker. It's clear that a lot of thought was put into the unexciting parts of the language. That's why I like using it even though I don't particularly need the borrow checker and I'd be happy with GC. Some examples off the top of my head:
- Expression-oriented nature makes code easy to write and nice to read
- Compilation errors are as clear and helpful as possible
- Comprehensive yet skimmable API documentation
In short, Rust is a nice language outside of the borrow checker.A lot of the things which strike me as nice about Rust can't be said about Go. For that reason I think Go is a surprising suggestion for someone who likes Rust but doesn't care about ownership and lifetimes.
There are a number of minor but valid frustrations I encounter when writing Go which are completely orthogonal to the brief of "C but with GC and easy concurrency". I'd understand if these problems were a result of the language's goals but often they seem to exist for no particular reason. In that regard I think Go is quite dissimilar to Rust.
I hope that explains my viewpoint more clearly :)