I have a lot of reservations about RTK2 (as I understand it; I've only paged through it at the bookstore), and am wondering if anyone has an alternative text they'd recommend.

It seems like there are only four or so compounds for each kanji, regardless of how common it is. For instance, there might be something like 分, which has a million common compounds, whereas a less common kanji will have an equal number of kanji.

My initial aim is to learn the top 5k or so compounds and kun-yomi verbs, etc. While RTK2 seems to be arranged well, it isn't necessarily helpful on that point.

I was a Japanese major 20 years ago, but if you don't use it, you lose it. I'm thinking about just using RTK2 and supplementing it with my old Nelson dictionary and/or online lists of common compounds.  

I've read about Kanji in Context; has anyone used it? Or another text? Or a different method?

Thank you!

I used the Core 2000 & 6000 anki decks for vocabulary, along with Tae Kim's grammar guide (http://www.guidetojapanese.org). Any large vocabulary list like the Core ones would probably work.

Thanks! This is a big ask, but has anyone seen an anki deck or core list sorted by character? Or is there some way to do that in anki? That would be a helpful adjunct to Heisig.