I do think a lot of it is inherent in the design choices that Rust has made. Rust, as a language, has a fairly large surface area. There's a lot of different syntactical and conceptual lessons that need to be learned by new Rust programmers.
Compare that to, say, Lisp. My first programming class at Berkeley was taught in Scheme, which is basically Lisp. Within the first 20 minutes of the first day, the professor had not only gone over a bunch of introductory announcements, but he'd also introduced us to every bit of syntax we would learn in the course. The second lecture covered car/cdr and recursion. Beyond those two lessons, everything we learned was about the practice of programming, not the language we were programming in.
Rust occupies a fairly unique position of being high level, with lots of abstractions to make experienced programmers more productive, and low level with fairly precise control over lower-level hardware concerns. That's really impressive, but I do believe that impressive power comes at the cost of an unavoidable learning curve. You'll never get a backhoe to be as simple to operate as a shovel. Which isn't to say that there isn't ample opportunity for the work that you and Carol are doing to make learning Rust easier--beginners now have it much easier than people like me that jumped in around 0.8. But it is to say that I don't think it's possible to ever make Rust as easy to learn as conceptually simpler languages.
If I were designing a CS curriculum, I'd start new students with a Lisp dialect, then move on to Assembly (which, while hard, provides what is, to me, an essential view of the actual hardware that you're using) and then move on to the more practical languages. I'd still like to teach Rust, but it would come later to help introduce advanced concepts like compilers and operating systems.