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To sum up my take on variant pieces:

1. It would be great to be able to buy them

2. The CV market appears to be too small to justify a large production run

3. A production run would undoubtedly exclude many players' desired pieces and desired boards

Rich, you ask, 'But if you happen to play someone a game, and they like it, how will they be able to get the equipment to play it by themselves?'

That is a fair question. And it would be great if they could buy the pieces, board, or even the actual entire game. The first variant set I made was for my Pillars of Medusa. A few guys played it at work. It drew a crowd. However, even if they could buy it, would they? And if they could buy pieces, they'd likely get the rook/knight bishop/knight, queen/knight combo pieces... but they'd still have trouble because they'd need an 11 x 11 board a Medusa piece and a Morph piece. So even if they could buy variant pieces, I think they could always end up with a variant that they like that they simply wouldn't be able to buy all the pieces for.

I played Maxima using pieces made of bottle tops with the CV graphics glued inside... it matched the CV pre-set and was thus great visually.

I played Shogi with probably 8 different people face to face over the years. All liked it, but we always used one of my 2 sets. Only one of the 8 players bought Shogi. It was the same with Xianqi. I played against a man from Viet Nam on his set. I liked the game a lot and made 2 sets of my own (one traditional Chinese style and one 3D Staunton style for teaching Fide players the game). Later I ended up buying a large wooden Xianqi set, an imitation jade set, and a magnetic one that resides on the refrigerator. One of the people I played, a former member of Mensa, bought a set.

There is, however, a very small market for Shogi and Xianqi in the U.S. If it were not for their popularity in Asia I doubt that companies would be keen on producing those sets. As a sad note... I believe the market for other CVs is even smaller.