some good English classifiers?

I think any of the examples you mentioned are leftovers from long before we called our language English. They probably date back to something like Proto-IndoEuropean or even earlier (we need a real linguist on this forum). This reminds me of the way some languages treat what we laughingly refer to as gender (no relation to sex at all, just a way of categorizing different objects). These languages might have one gender for long thin objects, another for round objects and still another for flat objects.