Well, if you were not talking about stalemate, it seems you had no point at all. Without stalemate, King capture and checkmate are fully equivalent, so that using one or the other can certainly not be responsible for a "gulf of draws". Fact is that most Chess-like games have a rather large 'draw sector', and the initial position is usually in that sector. This is a logical consequence of that you run out of material, and whatever remains at some point will not give you enough advantage to force a checkmate / king capture. The only remedy against that which I am aware of is piece drops. Then the material is recycled, so that you never simplify to a trivial draw. Games could still end in draw through repetition, however. In mini-Shogi they even plugged that hole: repetition there is a loss for sente.

I don't think that comments to Chess with Different Armies is the proper place to discuss this, however. So to get back on topic:

I played a few test games between Fairy-Max and ChessV. The latter at 15 sec/move, the former at 40 moves / 5 min. Fairy-Max seems to be a bit stronger at these settings: it won by 16.5-7.5. There always was an interesting fight, however. It is important to do a test like this to see if any engine has obvious 'blind spots', which would not be revealed in self-play.

I stated before that misconceptions about piece values hardly affect the rusults of self-play tests, where both sides share the misconception. This is because no matter which piece it thinks is stronger, one of the two players will always avoid the trade. But this doesn't apply for some strategic misconception. For instance, an when playing the Nutters, pushing all your pieces forward is a mistake, as they cannot outrun opponent passers. But even when the opponent doesn't know it either, and also thinks advancing is good, there really isn't any way he can stop you from advancing, in the end-game. So the engine handling the Nutters blindly runs into the knife, the opponent initially being sour about it. Untill at some point that opponent sees "wow! by trading/sacrificing such and such, I am suddenly left with an unstoppable passer!". This now doubt hurts the performance of the Nutters, compared to armies where you cannot make this mistake. It is a bit like telling an engine P is worth more than Q. There is no way the opponent will ever be able to prevent you from trading Q for P, even if he thinks P is worth more too. Having no Q to waste under those conditions should be a big advantage!

In watching the Fairy-Max vs. ChessV CwDA games, I learned that ChessV is pretty poor in the end-game. It gets completely passive, moving its King to a corner in stead of to the center, and moving it back and forth there. While the opponent in the mean time centralizes his King, advances his passers, etc. This behavior should hurt all armies somewhat equally, though. In general ChessV seems to have an inclination for pointless King moves; during the middle-game game it usually shuttles his King between g8 and h8 several times. What is also strange is that it seems to have a large preference to 'develop' his Knights (when handling FIDE) or to a lesser extent Fibnifs (when handling Nutters) to d1 and e1! This very odd behavior must hurt the performance of the mentioned armies, even in self-play, as again there is no way an opponent could ever prevent you from moving your Knights to e1&d1.