Rust is genuinely novel, so for most of us its going to be less familiar, so it will take longer to learn. It's not like learning Python if you already know Ruby, for example. The upside is that it offers some pretty great guarantees you can't (yet) find elsewhere. If you want those guarantees it will be worth it, if those guarantees don't matter to you, it may feel like a slog.
The banner one is memory safety without garbage collection. This enables is a terrific degree of library composition. Unlike C/C++, you can generally expect that libraries you pull in will also be memory safe.
The other one is thread safety, due to the compiler-enforced ownership semantics that prevent threads from accessing shared data unless they do so in a well-defined way.
