I do wonder how much the fetch-source-and-build-all-dependencies approach contributes to the poor perception of compile times -- your very first experience of "how long did cargo take to build this project" will be terrible because it will include downloading and building a ton of dependencies...

Agreed - I didn't do reliable benchmarks on how long was fetch + compile dependencies vs compiling the project itself.

My build times also included fetching dependencies, which only took a few seconds on my modestly fast 8 MB/s network.