Hi e.roome,
This is not a direct answer to your question, but post
#41943 provides a good hint as to how you can make this work if all else fails. In the example, roughness is used to determine active layer thickness. I don't know about the init_compo subroutine, but I imagine it works along similar principles where you read a variable from the geometry file and, at each point, set the sediment class value to whatever is in the geometry file.
Again, I'm not sure this is the best way to proceed, but it is
a way to proceed if nothing else works.
Hope this helps,
André Renault