Rust would be an excellent fit for the type of work you describe. Assuming I understand the specifics correctly, the regex and serde crates would make the parsing + converting pretty effortless and fast.

With familiarity, can Rust’s intuitiveness match Python’s “from idea to deployment” speed?

Yes and no. For experienced developers, the total time from “start” to “finished product” is probably going to be about the same in both. It’s how that time is allocated that really distinguishes them.

Rust is going to make you put in more work up front compared to Python: negotiating with the compiler, getting your types in order, that sort of thing. The benefit is that what comes out the other end tends to be baked all the way through - “if it compiles, it works.”

Python, being a dynamic scripting language, is going to make it easier to get a vertical slice or minimum viable product up and running. But when/if you scale up, you have to pay that time back fixing problems that Rust’s static analysis could have caught at build time.