💡📝Charles Gilman wrote on Sat, Jul 2, 2011 06:08 AM UTC:
It is true that the back-rank pieces are hard to develop in the opening, but once the Pawn barrier breaks down they can leap over the middle rank and then get into the game. All right, it means tha game starts off very FIDE-like, but it can diverge later on. In fact as a Knave cannot protect an e4/e5 Pawn as a Knight can it would diverge from the most stereotyped FIDE play pretty quickly.
As I said, I could recast the middle files but I suspect that a Wazir behind the King and Ferzes on the d file (that pattern keeps x-file Pawns protected) would be even harder to develop. Where the latter pieces might come into their own would be in a 10-file Elephant-free 'Courier Lite', but that's getting rather away from this page's variants.