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I had visited your website before, but the sheer quantity of variants
presented there discouraged me from examining them in detail. One thing
that in my view makes the variants less modest is the way the gating in of
the pieces in hand. I also dislike this in Seirawan Chess, it is a new
element that is definitely not standard in any major variant, where all
participating pieces are normally on the board from the start. IMO this is
a much more alien step than playing on a wider board.

The Superchess solution for this, which simply substitutes an orthodox
piece for an unorthodox one before actual play starts, seems much more
natural to me. This is partly driven by laziness: implementing gating
requires all kind of additional code to be added to the server and
graphical client, (to allow pieces to appear in vacuated squares), while
the other thing can be simply implemented by adding a file in the
directory of initial positions.