If you are willing to create your own layout or use a third-party layout, you could forgo dead keys and instead put all your symbols on the "AltGr" layer (which I think basically works the same as the "Compose" key).
The approach I took for my keyboard layout [0] was a compromise: I kept the base layout the same as US, but added a bunch of dead keys on the AltGr layer. So e.g. ⟨ď⟩ is ‘G-% d’; ⟨ɐ⟩ is ‘G-f a’.
