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Fergus:
| We each have our preferences. In general, your program will appeal to 
| a broader base when it can accommodate more preferences than just your
| own. For example, Game Courier uses some graphics I don't like and 
| supports many games I have never become interested in, but it is more 
| popular than it would otherwise be because I didn't limit it to my own
| preferences.

Before I invest in that, I would want to be sure that there are actually
people that want to use this feature at all. The user base of WinBoard
seems to be far more interested in the games they use it for, and how well
and reliably it supports the rules of those, than in having multi-colored
pieces. They don't use WinBoard for generating artwork to hang on their
walls...

The way you scale the entire board, if I could find  similar function in
the Windows graphics library, does sound like it might be very expensive.
Doesn't anti-aliasing involve Fourier transforming the image back and
forth? You would have to do that every time the board changes (i.e. every
move). Anything CPU-intensive is a no-no in a GUI that run on the same
machine as the engines. There are already people that are complaining
WinBoard currently uses more CPU time than they can afford fo their
purpose (wich is playing sub-second games).

Although there i a general truth in the things you say, I still think it
is good to keep well-defined priorities. There is still so much that can
be done. I think the risk that there are people that say: 'I am not going
to play Shogi, as the pieces have only a single color' is very small. They
are either interested to play Shogi, and would do no matter what to achieve
that, or they don't.

In fact there is a lot that can be done with just outline and inner color.
The Xiangqi pieces you show are in fact just that. The outline and the
(solid) piece symbol are one color, the inner regions another. The
WinBoard system could easily handle that. You could have designed the
Shogi pieces similarly.