[cryptonector]

The verb conjugation books I grew up with had more subjunctives for French than for Spanish. Whether some are considered archaic, I'm not sure. I don't buy the thing about simple past tense -- I use it, though admittedly not very much, and anyways, if it's used in writing then it's used. There are tenses in Spanish that are not used much depending on where you travel -- if you consider all the variations by Spanish-speaking countries, of course, Spanish starts to look significantly more complicated than advertised!

As for English, I think that there are fewer patterns for growing minds to hang onto than in Romance languages. But that's just a feeling born of my experience; I'm not entirely sure.