Busy Monday, yeesh. I think I misled some people by not specifying that the 10mA are at the drain - I have no problem driving the gate with the mcu (I have one unit with a 2n7000 and one with a BS170 - same performance). If the drain gets less current than that, it switches slowly, increasing the circuit on time to sample. So right now I have a divider with 120 and 180 ohms, which gives me 10mA from my 3V battery (2 D-cells).
As I said, the device is extremely low power, and I am looking to minimize usage whenever possible - I could just monitor the supply less frequently, or I can just increase the values in the divider and leave the circuit on longer to get a sample, but an ideal solution would be a small signal fet or bjt that turns on quickly (~linearly with current would be great) with small drain/collector current. Most datasheets list turn on time for 10mA drain/collector current for small signal transistors, but this falls off dramatically within an order of magnitude or two (from ~10ns @ 10 mA to ~100us @ 0.1mA - so 4 orders of magnitude increase in time for a 2 order drop in current).
All told it's not a huge deal - the client won't lose sleep if the device is expected to last 10 years instead of 20 (I know, I know, battery shelf life is less than 10 years, but very low power + supercapacitor + battery monitor means it can be up for a very long time) but I want to make sure I've done my due diligence and there isn't an easy solution I'm overlooking from lack of knowledge.