Exactly! The only thing harder than making something so ambitious would be doing it in a huge legacy codebase with an existing leadership team fighting against someone vying to rock the boat. Being new is an opportunity, not a flaw. It means there's a lot of work to do, but that's tractable with the right organization structure that I think we've successfully managed to build— and it's something other projects really struggle with, so starting fresh in that respect also avoids problems from cultural elements that could very well be the blame for the inadequacies of those existing projects.
This leaves only three options:
1. start contributing to the project slowly, try to get into their ranks, participate in conversation, and hope that you share the same vision
2. fork it and learn the codebase by yourself
3. write your own
Out of those, given the obviously conscious choice to go with Rust, and the ambitious goals, the third option is the only one that makes sense.