It's sounds pretty standard in it's exorbitance to me.
The tickets that aren't gifted tend to be paid by corporations using up their training budgets, and well-heeled consultant networkers rather than individual coders I suspect.
Yeah it sucks that people who are using Rust as hobby can't participate in these conferences w/o coughing up big chunk of cash. But hopefully there are recorded streams available for these later.
I have no idea, but it looks like they've been in the event space for a while so I would expect the logistics side, at a minimum, to work well. Running several events concurrently also lets them benefit from shared infrastructure and expertise instead of being a purely one-off thing. I'd probably consider it once the speakers are announced.
