Progmem is EXTREMELY useful. So useful that maybe there should be some way to make it the default storage for const variables. Though how you automate access to everything progmem const in all existing functions/whatnot is more than a little tricky.
I suppose a pre-processor could handle it and resolve the consts into flash constants and extract them into ram temporarily where they are used for function calls, etc?
i.e. a storeConstsInFlash setting?