By applying shunt shunt feedback from the Drain to the Gate of the first JFET stage of my compressor, I reduce VDS across the optofet  by a factor of 5! So with a input of 1 volt, the the VDS of the optofet is about 200mV worst case. Now it performs beautifully. The feedback consists of a 470k ohm resistor in series with a .1uF cap from drain to gate. Now the source must be bypassed with a 10uF cap – where before it was optional. The gain of the stage with this feedback is now about 4. What happens is that the feedback subtracts from the input at the optofet drain node greatly reducing the VDS across the voltage controlled resistor – while still providing gain.