Did you know 0 is not simply the number between -1 and 1? That also is irrelevant when teaching the masses! I don’t mean this to be snooty, but I hope it illustrates my point that you can emphasize something which will work extremely well for everyone in every day life.

You’re right that there are extremely rare exceptions (though even official sources like Purdue OWL and Chicago manual of style disagree on the finer points), but I will keep telling everyone you never, ever use it for plurality. I would be much happier seeing people type “there should’ve been WotLKs for users to choose between” than “I had three burger’s” on the very rare chance I see the former. I hope you’ll join me!

I'm not sure what you're getting at about 0, but it's a good segue. I'm a math guy, and it is not extremely rare for me to want to express something like "how many i's". The alternative punctuation, "how many is," is confusing.

A bit off topic, but how would you react to her's or their's? Not real words, but the intention is clear, and possessive.

I mean that if you subtract 1 from 2, the only thing you’ve done is a decrement, but once you reach 0, you’ve met a kind of mathematical boundary. It preserves numbers through addition, like how 1 preserves in math. It’s the only number that destroys information in multiplication. It’s more interesting than a simple location in a number line. Kind of a special digit, is all. We don’t get into that in basic math though.

And it’s slower, but id recommend “how many ‘i’s” if you want to be as correct as possible (use double quotes when it’s not already in a quote of course ((wow, grammar for discussing grammar gets weird)). But again, in domain-specific applications, I think these rules go out the window.