I'm looking at how many of the bugs and security issues are due to memory unsafe code - it's A LOT and new ones come up almost daily. Humans are just bad at writing safe code because we are so fallible. So if we can eliminate a significant percentage of these bugs from the ground up that suddenly becomes very interesting. Besides personally after two decades of C and C++ (and debugging them) I find Rust much more pleasant and "ergonomic" to use.

If we want an OS to be more secure by design we really have to begin at the most basic level. It might never be perfect but we can greatly reduce the attack surface. This is also why Microsoft is rewriting a number of vulnerable system components of Windows in Rust.

So why is it important to the end-user? Well, if that's Average Joe, maybe not but Redox OS right now is not mainstream, it is for us nerds who are interested in a safer OS and to see what can be done in that space. Maybe you don't care and that's fine, but some of us do and just like any post here, people can chose to skip over it or dive into the discussion, we can't guarantee that all posts or projects are interesting to everyone :)