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An interesting question regarding normal chess is: How much of the depth is meaningful depth?  It is possible to have a position in normal chess where you meaninglessly move a bishop or knight around, stalling for time and so on.  This makes the number of the moves deeper than in Dipole Chess, but is it meaningful depth?

The one thing about Dipole, because it is impossible, short of capturing, to restore a piece to a prior position, that every move has an impact in the entire game.  A decision to capture one way (and at a certain turn), instead of another (and another tunr), results in pieces in different places on the board when it comes to the end game.  This could make the difference in the end game, with a piece being able to capture backwards and buy more turns, and win the end-game tempo race game.

If one were to cut out redundancy in normal chess, then it becomes a question how much deeper it is than Dipole Chess.  One think about Dipole Chess is that positions are a bit fragile, and you can mess up much easier in the mid-game.  

Anyhow, I don't want this post to be something that sounds like I am shilling a design I did.  I just happened to see how Forwards Chess that someone else did was like Dipole, minus what is in Dipole that is added to Dipole Chess.  It also should be an interesting study in how slight changes to normal chess rules can result in a game that is very different.  One can argue that Dipole Chess is a modest chess variant, but the consequences of the removal of certain rules makes for a game that potentially plays less like chess than more wild variants out there.