Go to a local Vietnamese fingernail-making place (where you will discover that 99.9% of the customers are female) and get them to put a layer of acrylic on top of your existing nails...after you've grown them long enough to suit your picking style, with nails, that is.

The results are unbeatable. Your acrylic-reinforced nails give you totally natural feel and excellent tone on every note. It takes little or no time to get used to them, they don't catch on the strings, and they're virtually unbreakable.

You will need to get them filled in at the back about every 6 weeks as the nails grow out. It's not expensive to get these "fills" done.

You will also need to file them back periodically at the front, using a coarse nail file followed by a medium nail file to clean them up. This you can do yourself, no need to go to the nail clinic.

I play this way all the time now, and it's ideal. I wish I'd known about it 40 years ago.