It also doesn't help you to attract new contributors. With the changes we made over in Ubuntu to switch to rust-coreutils and sudo-rs, we have seen an incredible uptake in community contributions amongst other things, and it's very interesting to me to try to push APT more into the community space.
At this time, most of the work on APT is spent by me staying awake late, or during weekends and my 2 week Christmas break, the second largest chunk is the work I do during working hours but that's less cool and exciting stuff :D
Adding Rust into APT is one aspect; the other, possibly even more pressing need is rewriting all the APT documentation.
Currently the APT manual pages are split into apt-get and apt-cache and so on, with a summary in apt(8) - we should split them across apt install(8), apt upgrade (8) and so on. At the same time, DocBook XML is not very attractive to contributors and switching to reStructuredText with Sphinx hopefully attracts more people to contribute to it.
