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Kyoto Shogi style switchbacks could be interesting. But there is a problem: the instant a Pawn or Drunk Elephant moves, it would be forced to promote, which boosts defense early on and makes the game less interesting in my opinion. Of course, this can be easily solved by including exceptions to this rule for those pieces, and providing some sort of visual cue to match. But to me, the condition that promotion/demotion only happens on captures makes more sense, as you would need less visual cues for it.

Yes, definitely some of the promotions would need to be changed to make Kyoto-Suzumu playable. It could be interesting to follow Kyoto Shogi's lead, and change the promoted sides of the Pawns/Drunk Elephants so that the pieces swap between long-range and short-range roles, rather than being defensively strong in both (and it's probably sensible to scrap the promotion to Prince entirely).

Probably most of the promotions/demotions would benefit from changes, really; I agree with you that having no exceptions to the rule would be preferable, so the whole thing would have to be carefully tested. I'd be inclined to have most pieces promote/demote to pieces that don't share most of their moves, so that players have to cope with each piece having two distinct personalities from move to move. In any case, these sorts of questions are what intrigues me about the idea -- it'd be quite a design challenge :)

Thanks for reintroducing the two different colours to Hanten! That's a helpful little mnemonic for players new to the switchback-capture idea.