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Before I invest in that, I would want to be sure that there are actually people that want to use this feature at all.

There's me for one. I don't use Winboard, because it has poor graphics, and I don't think it yet supports any games I'm interested in well-enough that I can't play with another program that has better graphics. For now, I prefer to use ChessV, which plays many games well and includes some of my own graphics with it. I have a good Shogi program that came in a commercial suite that also includes Chess and Xiangqi, though I prefer other programs for those games, such as Chessmaster and Coffee Chinese Chess.

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.

Yes, probably because the poor graphics turn off those who care about such things. My point is that you can expand your user base by allowing easier customization options for graphics.

They don't use WinBoard for generating artwork to hang on their walls...

I don't use Game Courier or Zillions of Games for that purpose either, but I do like to use a nice looking board and piece set when I play a game.

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).

I'm no expert on how anti-aliasing is done. I just use a function supplied by the GD library. But I can tell you it is done very fast, and I expect Winboard would have to do only between moves, not when it needs all the CPU power for calculating a move. Anyway, resizing boards is not as important as just allowing bitmap images to be used for boards and pieces. It makes a difference only for large variants that don't easily fit on the screen. Game Courier's boards and pieces are at a scale that normally fits the screen for most games and usually don't need to be resized.

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.

I'll still play Shogi, but if Winboard plays Shogi only with shoddy graphics, I will play Shogi with another program. The issue here is not whether people are sufficiently interested in Shogi but whether your program would be a more appealing option than some other program.

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.

Shogi is a good reason for including multi-color pieces. In Shogi, the promoted sides of pieces are normally red rather than black. This makes it easier to tell promoted pieces from unpromoted ones, and it is crucial when you are using a westernized set in which the promoted pieces use the same images as the unpromoted pieces.