Thanks a lot for the advice! I misused “radical” before but actually meant components, not the one arbitrary radical. Remembering characters as a block of components definitely helps. I think that would fall under the idea of “chunking” that memory experts talk about. Sometimes I remember a character on the first go because it’s a combination of components I’m very familiar with. I haven’t checked out the Outlier dictionary but I’m going to now. I often go looking at the character components to help me remember them, but better composition that Unicode data would but great.

I use Pleco flashcards to do spaced repetition. Not sure how it compares to Anki, but it takes almost no effort to create new cards, and that’s good for me because I can easily get sucked into fiddling with tools instead of using them.