quick square root axes
If you do write your own, the hardest part will be picking the nice tick marks. ?They should be approximately evenly spaced, but at nice round values of the original variable: ?that's hard to do in general. ?R has the pretty() function for the linear scale, and doesn't do too badly on log axes, but you'll need to work out your own rules for the sqrt or other scales.
This seems like a nice (if smallish) research problem... Hadley