The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, so I doubt there’s much value in any of them. I don’t think any of them address the main complaints about chess either, which as far as I can tell are:
1) It’s too drawish
2) It requires too much memorization to learn
Fischer Random or similar variants solve both of those problems very well. But they sacrifice one of the things that a lot of people actually love about chess, which is that chess as a body of knowledge is continually growing forever. You can learn something about chess today by reading Morphy’s games from the 19th century, and any time you play or watch a game today you’re most likely going to see a brand new game of chess, that nobody’s ever seen before (and if it’s a top level game it could be a very interesting brand new game of chess).
I personally doubt tinkering with mechanics has any improvements to offer chess, and I don’t think most people actually want the most frequently complained about “problems” with the game to actually be fixed.
> The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are,
Classical, white wins 18/1000 and black wins 3/1000 with 1 minute per move. Semi-torpedo, this is 27 & 6/1000, so it's both less imbalanced and less drawish than classical chess with very high level play.
(White's 6x advantage is reduced to 4.5x).
It also has a slightly richer set of interesting moves per position on average.
A bit more imbalance in other variants isn't a catastrophic problem, either, IMO, with tournaments consisting of multiple games and equal numbers of games as white and black.
Your other point-- yes, any benefits of tinkering with the rules needs to be balanced against what it does to the traditions and continuity of the history of the game.
1) It’s too drawish
2) It requires too much memorization to learn
Fischer Random or similar variants solve both of those problems very well. But they sacrifice one of the things that a lot of people actually love about chess, which is that chess as a body of knowledge is continually growing forever. You can learn something about chess today by reading Morphy’s games from the 19th century, and any time you play or watch a game today you’re most likely going to see a brand new game of chess, that nobody’s ever seen before (and if it’s a top level game it could be a very interesting brand new game of chess).
I personally doubt tinkering with mechanics has any improvements to offer chess, and I don’t think most people actually want the most frequently complained about “problems” with the game to actually be fixed.