I've started noticing different a's recently in typography since it was pointed out to me that people with dyslexia and people with lower literacy skills struggle with the "upright" style lowercase A (as show in this font and a lot of other popular fonts) as opposed to the "italic" style lowercase A that most people hand write.
Why is the italic lower case A so different from bold and regular lower case A for Clear Sans? The italic version matches better the @ used as well.
You're right, the italic a is like from a completely different typeface, wow. I kind of like it better, and since it's under an open-source license, I might make a version with this version as the general one.