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In a way, shatranj is like baseball. It packs 10 minutes of action into 4 hours of playing time. :-) The only people who play it, as far as I can tell, are us, pretty much. The only place I found playable shatranj online besides here was at Zillions, and that was mostly all shatranj variants. Even the one guy who offered the original gave variants on it. [Okay, I didn't look hard, but still, looking through the first few pages of a few google searches turned up only Zillions and this site for playable shatranj. Not a big audience.]

As a game, shatranj was superceded by more modern forms, which had better play value. Chess is a better game than shatranj, just as Go is a better game, with more play value, than tic tac toe. But shatranj superceded some other, more ancient game[s], because it was better and gave more play value then. [Think about that for a minute: if the alfil and ferz were significant improvements over the pieces before them, how bad was that previous game, to modern sensibilities? ;-)]

Maybe it comes down to a case, not of exhausting the possibilities, but of exhausting the probabilities. FIDE seems to have hit that point, at high level, anyway. In some senses, the 'good moves' are already taken. That's why the shuffle. Now, note this - since chess has 2 infinite slider [singly] colorbound bishops to shatranj's pair of 8-square-only alfils, and the modern queen to shatranj's colorbound ferz, clearly, the 'good moves' in chess far outnumber those in shatranj. 

For shatranj to be worthwhile as an intellectual game of the first order again, it must be updated, not just re-arranged. To keep it shatranj, the updating must involve shatranj-style pieces, and avoid the infinite sliders that mark modern chess as clearly different. The goal is to increase the possibilities without turning shatranj into FIDE.