While this set should have as many pieces as alfaeriePNG35, alfaerie-many has more than both, as several alfaerie pieces have not been converted to SVG yet.
This should be viewed as a temporary situation. In the process of putting Interactive Diagrams in existing articles, I create new SVG (and corresponding PNG and PNG35) when these use alfaerie-many pieces that had not been converted yet.
I can add that many images in the alfaerie-many set are duplicats or transforms (i.e. rotated or recolored pieces). The latter we don't really need; the DD already supports recoloring SVG, and it could be made to support general rotation of SVG pieces as well. In the CGI rendering engine I did this through allowing > and < characters in the FEN for indicating rotation of the preceding piece. In the alfaerie-many set the rotated pieces have ma,es that end in <number> pluc 'cw' or 'ccw' (for clockwise and counter-clockwise, respectively, the number indicating the rotation angle in degrees). The DD could recognize these character combinations as suffixes, and apply the requested rotation. So that, say, {frog180cw} would give you an upside-down black Frog. The suffix 'rev' is generally used for indicating a horizontally flipped piece. (Unfortunately for piece names that ended in a number, because these were duplicats, the number is again appended to the suffix, so a flipped camel2 is camelrev2 rather than camel2rev.)
As to the duplicats: there are alternative Camels and Elephants. I cannot imagine why a piece theme would need duplicats; I do not consider those Alfaerie pieces. When you start to represent the same pieces by other glyphs you are in fact making another font.
These mostly use letters and sometimes + signs for promoted pieces or numbers.
Because the + prefix is a well-established convention in Shogi, it might be a good idea to allow such prefixes to appear in FEN without the need for enclosing braces. (WinBoard does this, for instance.) So a + would automatically be grouped with the single letter that follows it.
This should be viewed as a temporary situation. In the process of putting Interactive Diagrams in existing articles, I create new SVG (and corresponding PNG and PNG35) when these use alfaerie-many pieces that had not been converted yet.
I can add that many images in the alfaerie-many set are duplicats or transforms (i.e. rotated or recolored pieces). The latter we don't really need; the DD already supports recoloring SVG, and it could be made to support general rotation of SVG pieces as well. In the CGI rendering engine I did this through allowing > and < characters in the FEN for indicating rotation of the preceding piece. In the alfaerie-many set the rotated pieces have ma,es that end in <number> pluc 'cw' or 'ccw' (for clockwise and counter-clockwise, respectively, the number indicating the rotation angle in degrees). The DD could recognize these character combinations as suffixes, and apply the requested rotation. So that, say, {frog180cw} would give you an upside-down black Frog. The suffix 'rev' is generally used for indicating a horizontally flipped piece. (Unfortunately for piece names that ended in a number, because these were duplicats, the number is again appended to the suffix, so a flipped camel2 is camelrev2 rather than camel2rev.)
As to the duplicats: there are alternative Camels and Elephants. I cannot imagine why a piece theme would need duplicats; I do not consider those Alfaerie pieces. When you start to represent the same pieces by other glyphs you are in fact making another font.
Because the + prefix is a well-established convention in Shogi, it might be a good idea to allow such prefixes to appear in FEN without the need for enclosing braces. (WinBoard does this, for instance.) So a + would automatically be grouped with the single letter that follows it.