All of the popular Twitch.tv streamers have been playing Rust on one server built for them. I've been watching a lot of that content for the past week and a half. Interesting game. Not sure I could put effort into farming and building when the server resets everything and all progress is lost. Plus the trolls, stream snipers, and campers.
Rust is a little hard to get your head around at the start. I completely understand your perspective of "Why grind, when it resets in a week"? Once you get into playing the game, you'll soon understand why the resets are a good thing. Some groups can gain dominance of a server in a day or two, and the reset is necessary to level the playing field once again.
There are a couple of things you need to know about Rust. A reset is known as a wipe, and there are two kinds of wipes. A BP(blueprint) wipe, which wipes everything including all your learned BPs. And a map wipe, which wipes everything excluding your BPs. Every month Facepunch (the developers of the game) release new content for the game, and this will require a forced BP wipe. All servers will wipe to get the new content. So some servers only wipe BPs on forced wipes, others can wipe BPs every other wipe. Some servers wipe every week, or two weeks, or some even once a month. I prefer server that wipe every week, as I will only play a server for around 2 to 3 days. That's enough time to build a basic base, and make some plays to get some gear, farm some resources and raid some bases. Then it's on to the next server.
For people completely knew to Rust, I would suggest trying a PvE server to get used to the many aspects of the game like base building, heli flying, gun recoil, electrical systems, and what monuments on the map are good for what loot. Going into a PvP server with 200 pop without knowing what's what will lead to you uninstalling the game shortly thereafter.
The streamers playing on hJunes private server was good for cross exposure. Shroud/Myth/xQc/etc brought a bunch of people to see Rust that normally wouldn't have. What you see on those streams isn't what Rust is like normally. Try watching the streams of players like Blooprint/Frost/Wally1k/Pheetus/hJune. Those guys are some of the top names for Rust streamers, and they play the hardcore PvP servers.