I strongly suspect this depends on how one comes across C. In my experience, people who learn C as a first language seem to develop a much deeper intuition for these subtleties than, say, someone who has cut their chops in higher-level languages and only then progresses (regresses? :)) to C.
I think this is a pretty good assessment. I learned C first, so a lot of this stuff comes naturally to me. On the other hand, a friend of mine learned Java first. Now he's in a Master's program and doing C, and he's constantly asking me about low level stuff like byte alignment.
