The topic was the no-GC no-runtime niche, which necessarily requires brilliant programmers, and they are stuck with C++. They would welcome tools to represent their resource control well, borrow checking or deny capabilities.
As a current C++ programmer who remembers what GCC 2.95's error messages looked like for even simple templates, I second you - it is less about the intellect, and more about experience and enough domain knowledge. But quite a few like me work on large C++ software that is not in the no-GC no-runtime niche; modules, good abstractions and native compilation would be enough to match or likely beat whatever we are putting together in C++, which doesn't even have modules yet - and the GC-based conveniences would be a big icing on the cake, so D, Nim, Pony all look interesting. (side note ... https://ponylang.io and not https://pony-lang.io as stated earlier)
I definitely think it is needed. I just don't think Rust has solved the paradox that the more you need something specialized the less you can afford the overhead.
Finding hundreds of web developers with some spare time who don't mind learning Rust, can port some of their tooling and use it in some part of their stack isn't going to be much of a problem. The same isn't true if you, say, need an embedded programmer who has worked with zigbee and needs to be in your lab for testing and verification.
Pretty much all major programming languages are where they are as a result of being some kind of "lowest common denominator" for their application. Something like Bash is pretty horrible as a programming language, but extremely accessible for sysadmins. Only now is it changing slightly were things like Python and Go is becoming more popular, but mostly because they are easier than the alternatives.
As a current C++ programmer who remembers what GCC 2.95's error messages looked like for even simple templates, I second you - it is less about the intellect, and more about experience and enough domain knowledge. But quite a few like me work on large C++ software that is not in the no-GC no-runtime niche; modules, good abstractions and native compilation would be enough to match or likely beat whatever we are putting together in C++, which doesn't even have modules yet - and the GC-based conveniences would be a big icing on the cake, so D, Nim, Pony all look interesting. (side note ... https://ponylang.io and not https://pony-lang.io as stated earlier)