Well, I think it is a justified complaint that it is not easy to see that there is a Rook move hidden in there. The bracket notation [smpW-sR] would make that more explicit. The notation of a full Griffin based on this idea would be [mpW-sR], and would automatically visit the F squares, as these are now reached by the first sideway Rook step. But it literally requires some 'out of the box' thinking to detour the trajectory over an auxiliary square (sW), and subsequently make that square fully transparent by giving it mode mp. And this obscures the fact that in reality the first square visited by the piece (in the sense that it can move to it or be blocked there) is an F square. That distracts greatly from the intuitiveness.
That is true, it wasn't easy to understand the bent moves at first for me for that reason, and also because it's not immediately obvious that 'a' actually applies only to the move at the end of the sequence of modifiers rather than being a connector between two different moves, and that every leg before the last is mandatory.
What about using the brackets alone to indicate that all the moves contained within are part of a sequence? [FfR] [smpWsR] You could differentiate between mandatory and optional continuations using a separator or with different symbols, such as [F+fR] and {FfR} meaning F followed by a mandatory R.
And then perhaps the whole sequence could be modified too, so what if you could do p[FfR] to get a gryphon that must jump (a grao)? And v[FfR] might work for the ship, if it's not ambiguous somehow.
That is true, it wasn't easy to understand the bent moves at first for me for that reason, and also because it's not immediately obvious that 'a' actually applies only to the move at the end of the sequence of modifiers rather than being a connector between two different moves, and that every leg before the last is mandatory.
What about using the brackets alone to indicate that all the moves contained within are part of a sequence? [FfR] [smpWsR] You could differentiate between mandatory and optional continuations using a separator or with different symbols, such as [F+fR] and {FfR} meaning F followed by a mandatory R.
And then perhaps the whole sequence could be modified too, so what if you could do p[FfR] to get a gryphon that must jump (a grao)? And v[FfR] might work for the ship, if it's not ambiguous somehow.