New to Rust

I am a C/C++ veteran. Just decided to learn Rust a few days ago. I used leetcode to try my skill, and found it extremely painful to deal with linked list (i.e. Option<Box<ListNode>>). Trivial C/C++ pointer operations become arcane in Rust because of the borrow checker and such. I totally understand why Rust chose to do this. I was just wondering how long it takes to become an expert in Rust's memory safety model? And by expert I mean you don't need to see compiler warning ane errors to write complex valid Rust code.