What makes you call it defective? It was used at least three times in a single source. I suspect it was absolutely deliberate. If we were talking about a Roman script R with a suspension stroke, you would hardly call it a defective spelling just because the intention behind its usage wasn’t clear.
If you think that the six-stroke form is a distinct character from ᚏ then propose it for encoding as a separate character. I doubt the evidence is strong enough to be accepted for encoding, but it has a better chance than a combining stroke character (which imo has zero chance)
I'm not prepared, based on the available evidence, to say it's a distinct character from ᚏ, or even a character at all. I will say there is strong evidence of scribes treating single strokes as characters, i.e. semantically meaningful, sub-letter glyphs which could be variably combined into letters.
If these really are just graphical variants with no difference in meaning or pronunciation, wouldn’t standardised variation sequences be the way to go? That’s how variant forms in the Myanmar, Phags-Pa, and Manichaean scripts are already being handled, and this case seems very similar to those.
I think this would probably require consensus among experts that 6-stroke R is an acceptable variant of 5-stoke R, and that their use cases are not distinct. I do think that standardised variation sequences might be a good way to deal with the character variants of the attested ogham ciphers though.
I agree that SVS would be an acceptable solution, but the UTC has repeatedly stated that it is not willing to define SVS for epigraphic or calligraphic glyph variants (they already rejected my proposal for ogham variation sequences in L2/16-110)
I'll have to check out your proposal. Still, given their position on glyph variants (which applies to discrete characters too), I wonder what the justification was for including "insular" letters in the Latin Extended D block: Ꝺ, ꝺ, Ꝼ, ꝼ, Ᵹ, Ꞃ, ꞃ, Ꞅ, ꞅ, Ꞇ, ꞇ.
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