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It's more like snowboarding or any activity with a high initial learning curve before a big payoff: It's hard, even painful, at the beginning, and you might come home covered in bruises, but eventually it "clicks" and it's a lot of fun.

Stockholm Syndrome is more about convincing yourself that a bad situation is good because you're stuck in it. I don't think there are too many people "stuck" with Rust yet. On the contrary, I think the borrow checker is a draw.

There is a sort of Gopher "successor" in the works called Gemini that was featured recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424

It aims to fix flaws in the Gopher protocol while still making it easy to implement clients.

If you haven't dug into Gopher, there's lots of cool stuff in it from ASCII art and old computer manuals to games and lots of blogs (called "phlogs"). I suggest grabbing a client and heading to the Gopher Lawn to get a taste:

gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn

(Lynx works as a client, but there are a ton more out there with fun UIs.)