Bought it, had a lot of fun, started a server with another guy, made a website for our server, that's nearing 40k(300-500 per day) visits and let the whole thing go.
It was modded, we were extremely active, I built 3 large arenas and hosted events regularly with the other mod for prizes.
Rust is extremely fun... BUT
Most of the server providers seem inexperienced, with intermittent and unexplained lag spikes.
The modding community is young, the mods I wanted didn't yet exist or existed in very primitive forms.
The game itself needs another years worth of work before its really ready/worth putting a lot of time into.
From a mod perspective, it SUCKED when investigating hackers... you can't go fully invis because you have your fucking name floating on top of your head and you're always making loud footsteps. The other mod custom coded a hook to be able to fly on our server to follow hackers without being found out and HE got steam banned from his own server(ain't that some shit). The logs are tedious, I eventually automated a script that ran every steamID that connected to our server through a steamid ban checker, found several cheaters this way.
As a non mod, a player, playing on other servers, mod abuse is rampant... this is the original reason we started ours.
I'll revisit the game when all of the above has been more or less addressed.