This is probably known somewhere, but something I noticed is that a way to think about Earley parsing is that, when you create an LR(1) shift-reduce parser, rat

This is probably known somewhere, but something I noticed is that a way to think about Earley parsing is that, when you create an LR(1) shift-reduce parser, rather than having it be an error in the grammar for there to be shift-reduce or reduce-reduce conflicts, instead you nondeterministically reduce (i.e., your state machine has a set of states rather than a requiring there to be a single state). This also ends up solving the left recursion problem in an efficient way. This is certainly slower than a deterministic LR(1) parser, but maybe if you're clever about the implementation you can efficiently handle local ambiguities in a grammar. Large-scale ambiguity is bad since you don't want small changes to have action-at-a-distance, but you could in principle have a strict LR(1) grammar that contains Earley sub-grammars for expressions.