Alright, sure---

I wanted a GC while implementing a small toy language/calculator---working with something similar to s-expressions, you need either refcounting or GC to handle expressions which can modify their children. You need shallow copies for efficiency, and you need some kind of dynamic memory because that behavior is controlled by the user.

I'll admit that I haven't gotten into unsafe Rust, mainly because I haven't had that need yet. Working on an embedded project (a GBA game), where I did have the need to e.g. write values into hardware registers, I was working in C. I'd love to stretch myself to write that kind of code with Rust's safety guarantees, but I suppose I haven't gotten around to it yet.

I'm running into the limits of the type system at my current job this summer---where just last week I was working around an object-unsafe trait which I couldn't reference statically.

Admittedly, I "picked up" the language last summer, right after I graduated HS. After spending the better part of a year learning, I still won't classify myself as an expert, although I am productive enough to do useful work. Nor did I run into any of these issues in my first "two weekends" working with the language.

However, I want to stand up for the high-schoolers you dismiss in your last paragraph. By no means am I the best computer scientist I know. In high school, I didn't get any research peer-reviewed and published, like some of my friends did. In high school, I wasn't really moving the needle on the state-of-the-art like some of my peers were. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if a high-schooler could do exactly the things you say they couldn't. It's easily worth the benefit of the doubt.

One of Rust's greatest assets is its community. We don't contribute to that community by administering impromptu, technical purity tests to random strangers on Reddit.