Christian Thalmann

I've only designed one Arabic font yet and don't actually read any of its languages, so I'm probably not the right person to ask. 

But isn't your base glyph + diacritics idea already the status quo in modern type design apps such as Glyphs? (For Latin as well.) Sure, some formats unlink the components in a compound glyph during export, but that's probably for backward compatibility with "dumb" user applications. 

As for your deconstruction of linked glyph variants, I think that would only work for extremely geometric typefaces that forego the rich texture of traditional Arabic script. The small irregularities in the practical realization of a character's underlying design in initial, medial, final, isolated, and even ligated environments add to the legibility of a typeface; they are not dead weight.

[aj əˈsɯwm jɻ̩ ɻiˈfɝːɻɪŋ tʰɯw ˌajpʰiːˈej]?

МДКЭ ДМЭЯIСД GЯЭДТ ДGДIИ

I'd recommend balancing out the counters of /a and /e in the light weights.

I agree with Chris that the tail of /g is too weak.

The accents are a bit too close to the letters for my taste, but maybe that's intentional. The /eogonek doesn't work that way, though.

Since you name-tagged me: I haven't done any commissioned work so far, so I wouldn't know. In the case of the Cormorant family, the «negotiations» basically came down to Dave Crossland making an offer and me going «OMG how much...?!».