God, strongly agree. My worse-than-a-coinflip skill at getting French gender correct on nouns that aren't very familiar too me is one of the big things keeping me from returning to it. Deeply discouraging. Thanks to easy rules, I can get Spanish nouns right every time unless I run into one of the exceptions (seemingly all French nouns are an exception to whichever of the dozen or so "rules" they're failing to follow).

I also find spoken Spanish sentences much easier to parse.

For the record, I've put way, way more effort into French than I ever have into Spanish, including enough immersive higher-ed coursework that at one point I was dreaming in it pretty often.

[EDIT] I should add that my greatest annoyance with it is how hard it makes it to practice noun vocab in isolation, which is also kind of vital if you ever want to get past the problem. You can't just consistently practice the more general indefinite form because it's too often abbreviated ("l'au") so then when you go to make some damn adjective agree with it you're lost because you never actually learned the gender. Using the definite article fixes that problem but feels wrong, and never made the gender stick for me anyway. So you basically end up having to practice modifying them with adjectives to get good at nailing the gender every time. That's a fun friggin' Anki deck to put together. eyeroll

I'm teaching Spanish (my native language) to my daughters and my wife, and I disagree. There are many, many nouns that don't mark the gender except in the accompanying article or adjective.

That's actually why I had so much trouble with it. I feel that every language with this "feature" is wrong. They need to be normalized in to a more proper form where there is no implicit gender for words. Much like I prefer letter forms with less embellishments.