The way I see it NLL added a huge number of edge cases. Pre-NLL it was clear what kind of lifetimes were possible; now I have no clue what the different lifetimes are and every keyword interacts with lifetimes in a different way.
Pre-NLL made the language incredibly clunky to use, with a lot of code acrobatics required to do something you know should work logically according to ownership but the scope lifetime rules wouldn't allow.
I don't disagree. But IMO a lot of clarity and comprehensibility has been sacrificed in the current implementation. I'd rather have seen a style that de-emphasised control flow keywords and made it easier to use closures, or simply blocks, to express the behaviour that people wanted. I've yet to see a case where what was really needed was NLL rather than better support for lexical lifetimes.
