Before anyone else digs this thread out:
As @Wombley wrote, this thread is quite outdated. From all @i3sven , @MrBean and myself could find during our investigation, the clicking sound (which is btw caused by the extruder stepper skipping steps, not by the filament gears sliding) has nothing to do with the filament feeder, it is really only the hotend which clogs up temporarily and then provides too much resistance even for the quite powerful extruder of the J1. You can slightly improve gripping of critical filaments if you use the original Bondtech gears instead of the chinese copies Snapmaker uses, but that’s it.
The gear distance finding you mentioned is by the way something the original Bondtech extruders (which are known to be very reliable) would suffer from as well if it were really relevant 