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Chess evolved from Shatranj, because Shatranj was BORING to the extreme.
Many pices were useless, or almost nearly so. So there was a great
incentive to replace them.

Today we face an entirely different problem: Chess is a magnificent game,
but it has been played so often that most of its possibilities have been
exhausted, and can now be mastered by rote learning. As the problem is
different, it is not obvious at all that the solution can be the same,
i.e. replace some pieces by other pieces. It is true that replacing, say,
Bishops by Cannons, or Knights by Ferz+Dabbaba pieces would make all
opening theory useless, but today we have computers. And these computers
can play the millions of GM-level games that led to the current level of
opening theory within a year. There are only a few hundred Human GMs, but
one Chess program of the level of the World Champion can easily run on
100,000 PCs...

So I guess what we need is more complexity, not different pieces per se.
Chess960 is an attempt to drive up the complexity 960 fold with the same
material, but it is ugly, ugly, ugly... The beautiful symmetry and
meticulous tuning of the opening array, where each piece starts on a
square that is not awkward, and traffic jams in the opening can be easily
avoided, is completely destroyed in most Chess960 setups. A game where
Knights start in the corner, or Bishop on b1/g1 is just no fun.

One way to get more complexity, is to start with more pieces. I am not
sure gating in pieces like Seirawan does is a good way: IMO the board gets
to crowded. Wider boards would be more natural. But this does pose the
problem of equipmet, as in some of the less fortunate parts of the World
boards larger than 8x8 are not easy to come by.

An alternative is the Superchess approach: this is played on a normal 8x8
board, with the normal number of pieces to avoid crowding. But the pieces
you play with are not the same in every game, as you start the game by
selecting pieces from a bigger set. Although Superchess does not mention
this as a requirement, you could refine the rules such that the prelude of
selecting the pieces creates an esthetically pleasing quasi-symmetric
array, and fobid certain classes of pieces on certain squares (something
that Superchess already does) to avoid awkward bottlenecks in development.


The complexity then would come from the large number of pieces you could
select from. The way I envision it, would be to have a list of Queen
replacements, a list of Bishop replacements, etc. These lists would be
chosen in such a way that developing the pieces does not cause awkward
problems.