> The Bengali fonts that you have installed happen to render it as a jophola
It's not only the Bengali font - the text rendering framework of my operating system also needs to have a bunch of complex rules to figure out that a jophola needs to be rendered. It also needs to know that the visual ordering of i-kar is before the preceding consonant cluster (দ in আদিত্য).
> the characters that are required to type a jophola have no semantic, phonetic, or orthographic connection to the jophola.
Not so sure about that. The fact that it's called a "jo"-phola points to a relationship. The relationship may have become less apparent as the script has evolved (though there are words such as সহ্য which makes the relationship more visible), but the distinction is still not as pronounced as between "ta" and "khanda-ta". For the khanda-ta case, it was explicit from the the then-current editions of the dictionaries produced by the language bodies of both Bangladesh and West Bengal that the character had become distinct (স্বতন্ত্র বর্ণ was the phrase that was used). As far as I know, there hasn't been any such claim about jophola from the language bodies. Also, if you look at the collation in Bengali dictionaries, jo-phola is treated as (্+য) for collation.
It's not only the Bengali font - the text rendering framework of my operating system also needs to have a bunch of complex rules to figure out that a jophola needs to be rendered. It also needs to know that the visual ordering of i-kar is before the preceding consonant cluster (দ in আদিত্য).
> the characters that are required to type a jophola have no semantic, phonetic, or orthographic connection to the jophola.
Not so sure about that. The fact that it's called a "jo"-phola points to a relationship. The relationship may have become less apparent as the script has evolved (though there are words such as সহ্য which makes the relationship more visible), but the distinction is still not as pronounced as between "ta" and "khanda-ta". For the khanda-ta case, it was explicit from the the then-current editions of the dictionaries produced by the language bodies of both Bangladesh and West Bengal that the character had become distinct (স্বতন্ত্র বর্ণ was the phrase that was used). As far as I know, there hasn't been any such claim about jophola from the language bodies. Also, if you look at the collation in Bengali dictionaries, jo-phola is treated as (্+য) for collation.