your success with an A sail is based on your typical sailing program ... the America Cup boats using monohulls used both A and/or S and I believe with the same size pole. But it did project out in front of the forestay.
10 years ago I used the J/30 pole on a Oday 27 and was pretty happy with the results using an A with a sock. We could jibe it flying it outside the forestay, but that took a bit of coordination. But easy plan was to sock and unsock.
There is a J/30 in RI who has used the A sail well and constructed a semi fixed bow sprit, but his marina decided that when he was deployed at the slip he was oversize and they started to charge him more.
When we do spin runs as a day sail we make sure we are doing a comfortable spin reach coming back. No one on the crew likes deaddown ... boring.
