[Grumbledour]

It hasn't really affected the language outside of some fringe groups and doing what you suggest is the kind of behavior that gets regularly made fun of when someone tries it.

For most germans, this seems silly, since we don't know or care why specific objects have a specific gender. Why are spoons male, forks female and knives neuter? Who knows? But then again, using the wrong pronoun still often sounds really weird to us, so no just using "das" for everything.

But of course, there are words where it can matter, especially since der/die/das are also used to refer to peoples positions for example. So I always thought having a neutral word accepted by others like 'the' in english could help german to get easier for everyone to learn while also making many things more gender neutral.

Incidentally, the language is changing here, but not because of gender issues, but rather because we incorporated many foreign words, often english, in the last decades and also many new immigrants have come to germany with not as good a grasp on the language. So, if you ask People for example which pronoun to use for "Blog", you will get three different answers. And while people poke fun at it, it is also not unusual to hear someone say something like "der Frau". People then just assume you are not very fluent in german but that's about it.