I can confidently tell you that no one who actually knows Latin would ever say French is "Latin with fancy rules."

Rust is more like Lojban. Its adherents are just as excited to tell you about it and it too was created to fix all those pesky problems from people using their language imprecisely.

So what is our alternative? I get that we need to start working on an actual viable open platform, but it seems like the difficulty is mostly hardware and device manufacturers locking the bootloader at this point, isn't it? So is that where we need to go? To make the "Raspberry Pi" of mobile phones?

I'm happy to help, I just don't have the free time to spearhead a whole project.

That's a good point. I parsed "fancy" as "more intricate" and was immediately affronted ;) I like your take on it.

Btw, your username just gave me a good belly laugh

But isn't that your point: that bootloaders are getting locked down by OEMs and so custom software is being made non-viable?