Making the dots bigger might help a lot. Here's an idea that might be relatively simple: have a J tokenizer active during typing, and every inflected graphic primary gets changed so that the dots are both enlarged and overlaid on the graphic. By "overlaid" I mean the result is a single character with an appearance of the graphic and its (enlarged) inflections squished together.
This would require new fonts, but they're simple and each new character correlates visually with normal J. It would let us retain the original J character combinations yet work visually with single-character words as we do in APL. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
