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I stumbled into this topic, in an attempt to make a lame Star Trek joke,
based on what Joe wrote.  Now, since Mr. Duke happened to reply in such a
way my joke appears to be taken seriously as a comment on the subject
(well, either that or he is commenting on what I had written before), I
felt compelled to read what was written in here, and want to comment.

I will say this: Unless there is something common that allows all ideas to
lend to a common development structure, that can collective be used by this
community here, and worldwide, it is more of the same that doesn't advance
anything.  All these attempts to generate endless variants is an activity
that doesn't do much to advance chess variants collectively, but may get
someone a few minutes of spotlight in a, 'gee that was clever', sort of way.

There seems to be a fixation on wanting to be clever, rather than doing
what works.  Either the cleverness comes in some form of trying to get as
weird as possible, so people will be amazed at how different you are, or
it is in the form of 'THE NEXT CHESS' (to which one designer I have
written says, 'Yeah, and I have 10 of them') where the person thinks
they have the magic bullet that will be THE game that the world will play
as the next form of chess.

To this end, can I propose that some thought be given to there being
developed a system for handling new ideas that they work more like legos
than they do discrete items that are meant to be seen as clever and
'Brilliant', that live and die on their own, and aren't used for any
other purpose but stand alone?

My take here is MAYBE if we design cool bits (like the Simplified Chess
Board), that people can roll their own with, rather than entire systems
that are give and take by themselves, we maybe can do something that
advances chess variants, rather than spin of a near infinite number of
reinventions of the wheel, in a state that we don't even know if it is
Heraclitian-Calvinballish or not.