I'm a citrus farmer. I have several acres of trees growing oranges. Now, you may know that we usually pick the oranges before they've fully ripened. Consequently, we have to store them in a building for a little while until they're ready for consumption. We have several of those buildings, so I've named them for family members, such as my daughter Vi, who married the boy next door, Davie Brown. And this weekend, I'm paying a crew to come out and repaint the building that's named after her. So come next Monday, it will be the white Violet Brown green orange building.

Thanks, I'll be here all week.

What variety of orange? I love blood-red oranges.

Just as a data point, to me, it doesn't matter which of those adjectives you think is more important, I think "the big red building" sounds much more natural than "the red big building." The latter sounds flat-out wrong to me.

What about:

A: What building do I need to go to? B: The big one. A: Which big one? I see a red one and a green one. B: The red big building.

I wouldn't say that. I've just tried saying out loud to a friend, and they also said it was weird. I would definitely say "The big red building," or even leave out "big" entirely - it's already been specified.

It's worth knowing that I'm a pure mathematician, and I frequently come out with utterances that others find odd, purely on logical grounds. It's plausible that there are circumstances in which I would violate these rules/guidelines/suggestions/baseless musings/whatever.

That's not one of them.

Why do we privilege individual judgements that something seems "weird," particularly when it would be perfectly understood?

It's as if linguistics is often modeling syntactic rules which reflect something other than natural communication as it actually occurs.

Even if you stress 'big'?

Just for the fun of it: In french, we often put the adjective (like red, in this case) after the noun. The building red (La bâtiment rouge)

And in your particular case, where we want to also tell it is big, we do: The big building red (Le grand bâtiment rouge)

But we can't do the following: The red building big (Le rouge bâtiment grand)

Different language, different grammar :) French is one of the most difficult language for these I think, a bunch of exceptions. It makes the language more "lovely" to hear but less "effective". Here we say English is made for business, it is one of those languages that just gets to the point fast and clear overall :)

And there are some adjectives which change meaning depending on whether they are after or before the noun. However, I have noticed that when these adjectives change meaning, often it the meaning that it has when before the noun has some degree of emotion or personality to it.

For example, ma propre chemise vs ma chemise propre (my own shirt vs my clean shirt). Or mon cher ami vs ma chère chemise (my dear friend vs my expensive shirt).

Yes many words have different meanings. It can get confusing. I can't imagine someone speaking a foreign language learning French :)

BTW I would be interested to read if someone shared his experience.

So in my experience, that was not the hard part of learning French, or Spanish for that matter. For someone coming from a non-gendered language, the gender of nouns is taxing to memorize. Often knowing what the correct word is and how it is spelled will have nothing to do with what gender it is.

The other hard part of learning French (for me) was the conjugation of verbs in various tenses, and specifically any words that are exceptions to the normal rules. If you take a look at a french grammar book for (e.g.) English speakers, it's likely that it will mostly concern conjugation.