Traits system is awesome and pure win. Pattern matching is not
that game changing but helps often enough to feel important.
Borrowship system is damn smart but totally impractical for most
real-world cases. Macros are utterly horrible and pretty much
unusable outside of advanced library internals.
Recently I attended local Rust meetup for curious newcomers - it
was very interesting to observe reaction of unbiased devs not
familiar with D at all. General reaction was "this is awesome
interesting language that I would never use for any production
system unless I am crazy or can throw away money like crazy".
Because, well, productivity.
D has done many things wrong, but there is one right thing that
totally outshines it all - it is cost-effective and pragmatical
tool for a very wide scope of applications.
