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Interesting question, George, and a temptation to hubris. I think there are different answers to your questions, depending on who is asked. Our goal in this project was to nudge the CV world toward seeing shortrange pieces as valuable in themselves. If you're out there, Christine - congrats! It actually worked! It was, way back at the beginning, Christine's idea to do a shatranj collaboration that started the project. And, for this website, it got a very good response. A number of people made games for it. And new people have referenced it in their short range games. So, I think that what's really come out of the project is that others are more willing to use shortrange pieces as main pieces in games, not just filler. In this little corner of the world, that rates as success. In the wider world, who knows? I suspect that in the future many of our games will be played by the multi-billions of people online. This is because we will have actually playtested them, and some of the good ones will survive.

As for the best pieces coming out of the project, I can't say. The hero and shaman are the most unique, and my personal opinion is that David Paulowich's Opulent Lemurian Shatranj is a true test of chess skill on the highest levels. 

But what I see is that the elephant [AF] and warmachine [DW] are showing up more, sometimes in a slightly different guise. Greg Strong's use of Betza's half duck [HFD], the scout [HW], which is an interesting, if twisted, knight analog, and the griffon [NHW] has apparently gotten people to look more, and use more, those sorts of pieces.

This points up another difference in short range pieces, awkwardness, a measure of how easy or not it is to use a piece. Compare the half duck to the linear hero [D+W]. Each reaches [up to] 12 squares, with a max range of 3. Each has stepping and leaping ability. Both color change. In fact, they both reach 8 of the same squares, of their respective 12. But the hero is an easier piece to use than the half duck. Some prefer that, some prefer it the other way. 

One other thing the project looked at was larger boards. I encouraged Gary Gifford to make larger boards for his game, and he put together some interesting variants, where the pieces stayed the same, and the board changed. No one has picked up on this, but size does matter...

As far as spreading the games, TSRP is also on zillions with 30ish games, if I recall, and some of the shatranj variants have gotten onto free chess software, like Greg's ChessV or HG Muller's chess engines. So games are out there.