[greenish_shores]

That's a really good comment! Thanks. By the way, pronunciation of articles also varies. With some variants "a" would get much more universal (but also making it harder to notice when it's used wrong), while with others it would be almost impossible to use "a" where "an" should be used without exposing yourself to a major tongue-twister.

And yeah, I'm aware that the subset of people mentioned is quite small. On this subject, it's that memorization requires close to no effort for me, and is close to instantaneous and long-lasting (as long as I run through it several times and the things learned aren't ending up being completely unused), while developing the intuitive feel of the right article, as you rightly put it, takes time (however, can also be close to effortless to some)... and lots of writing.