People just found the trio of &T, @T, and ~T to be strange and confusing. Lots of Perl comparisons, many people really dislike punctuation of any kind, it seems.
Most languages only have one kind of pointer, and they tend to use & and * as operators for them.
Sure, but people also find pointers and references confusing (& certainly their distinction). Literally all programming is considered weird if you talk to the right person.
I would argue as a rule of thumb, anyone who focuses on syntax over semantics has little to contribute until they write ten thousand lines in the language. Perl is a great example of how it still fails after this test passes. Rust feels a lot more like java and c++ now, and not in a good way. It could have done more to improve on basic readability than where we ended up, and people still bitch about basic tenets of the language like "lifetimes" and "not being enough like java".
You can stand on principle, or you can recognize that semantics is important, and syntax isn’t really, and therefore, accepting feedback about syntax is a fine thing to compromise on.
I also agree that you can’t listen to everyone, but this feedback was loud and pervasive.
Of course syntax is important. Otherwise people wouldn't complain about perl or C (eg wrt lack of operator overloading). It is just important in balance with semantics. And while I understand why rust compromised on this, IMHO it was a mistake that causes confusion about rust's memory management strategy. It looks too much like java and not enough like a language built around specific memory management paradigms. This compromise has backfired.
Most languages only have one kind of pointer, and they tend to use & and * as operators for them.