This.

Many people are still learning Rust and an emulator is probably a good way to get your hands dirty.

I'm doing something similar with a compiler project and my code is gradually getting better and more idiomatic.

But I'm still doing a lot of stupid things and getting the hang of it.

it's not at all about "quality of programmer" and you should never reduce extremely vague arguments to that. it's literally about time for quality program to be made an completed.

those C++ emulators have often been in development for 3-5x as long as a similar Rust one.