Doing the opposite is quite inconvenient indeed.

When you see .hr, Croatia is probably the last thing you would think of. It's the first two letters of Croatia spelled in Croatian ("Hrvatska"). There are only so many ways to shorten a word to two characters, and .ca, .cr, and .co were all taken. I guess they could have went with .ct, but they've decided on .hr instead.

Similarly, .flights is always gonna be more useful to have control over compared to .vuelos (same, but in Spanish).