Well, Joe, your ear has apparently gotten better with experience, so keep at it.

In my case I started so young that whether I had any kind of "natural" ear or not is hard to say. By age 7 I was listening to stuff on the transistor radio and writing chord charts out as the songs played, but that was more the result of having a teacher who beat fundamentals into me. I learned the circle of 5ths as soon as I knew what dot on what line or space went with this key or that key. Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE, or with ledger lines, Every Good Boy Does Fine At Composing Everything. Stuff like that. He had a lot of very young students mixed in with his "older and need a hobby" students so he was good at teaching kids.

Many people think recognition skills are a "you have it or you don't" kind of skill, but there are ear training drills that can sharpen it. You are proof that recognition can improve. In my case I have regressed from perfect pitch to near perfect pitch, in that you may play a B and I think it's a C, but as you'd go forward playing the song I would get the intervals correct and just the start note would be wrong. So you could play B to E to F#, and I might hear it as C to F to G. But if a song went along and there was a diminished or an augmented chord in there I would recognize what the chord type was. I might just have the root wrong.