Rust is a really cool language, but all this drama has been very off-putting. I sincerely hope the team gets their shit together and learns from this.

Agreed. Rust the language seems like a good tool, but I am very discouraged from getting invested in it when at least half of anything I end up hearing about Rust is some kind of new drama or in-fighting among the people who oversee the language and its community.

Shit happens, I know, but with Rust it feels like the frequency and magnitude is way out of proportion to other dev-centered communities. I am not involved, and I do not want to be, but from the outside it often appears like many of the people who are in positions of leadership are more concerned with posturing and politics and exercising whatever power is afforded to them than they are with the actual programming language and the well-being of its community.

So there was a mix-up with a speaker. So then the organization responsible should make it right, and announce that there was miscommunication and that it will be handled differently in the future. If it happened because someone was acting unprofessionally, then handle that internally and separately. It is ridiculous that one mishandled invitation is spiraling into a public mess of personal attacks and 4,000-word blog posts.