I am just getting started with Rust and am trying to determine whether to use rust-mode or rustic. From the look of it, it will take quite some time to make an informed choice so I decided to ask you for some clarification to save myself and others in the same position part of the effort.

Your readme mentions some features that rustic has but rust-mode lacks. That's a nice start but many questions come immediately to mind that are not addressed by a simple list of features, such as:

1. Does rust-mode still lack those features?
2. Do you port rust-mode improvements to rustic? Other way around?
3. Why fork in the first place? Conflict?
4. Assuming the fork is due to them wanting to continue to provide just the major-mode and you wanting to do a batteries-including ide: why did you fork rust-mode.el? Couldn't you have contributed to that in the upstream repository and make rustic depend on that?
5. Would it make sense to break up rustic into multiple smaller packages? I had to install quite a few dependencies that I am not actually going to use just so I could compile.
6. What happens if both packages are installed?

Errr.... I just saw that you commented on the issue tracker of the rust-mode repository.
That leaves me more confused than before, but also more hopeful.