I think so, yes. If you remove any of the things in the “core” I mention in the post, the language hangs together much worse even though it’s smaller; enums without pattern matching is a simple example.

I’m not just saying that I want to go back to the “good old days”, I really do think that those parts of Rust were designed as a coherent whole, in the same way that Uiua is designed as a coherent whole.