Here’s another way to do this, without using the conflict palette:
Make a Group (I’ll refer to it as a palette) that contains nothing but aliases to the macros in question. See MACRO: Make Macro Alias for more information.
Have the palette show for one action only, and trigger it with your initial hotkey.
With these aliases, assign whatever hotkeys you want as triggers. So there’s no problem assigning “a”, or whatever, because they will only be active for one action, then the palette goes away, effectively disabling the macros.
It’s a hard concept to get across (although easy to implement), so if I haven’t made myself clear, let me know.