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The whole story by Betza suggests to me that his was not sufficiently thought through. If you suddenly discover a way of handling the pieces that makes them much stronger, it is clear that you must have been quite far from optimal handling indeed, or it would not be possible at all. And it is in fact very unlikely that you would bridge 90% of what separated you from optimal handling in one sudden flash of insight. Even bridging 50% in one step requires a stretch of the imagination. So the new method of handling is likely to be quite far from optimum as well. And who is to say that an equally dramatic change in the style of defending against these pieces would not push their value back to well below that of the Knight?

Losing against Zillions is a very bad sign. Zillions is one of the weakest engines that exist, in any Chess variant. Its importance is that in many variants it is the only engine that plays them, and thus the strongest, by default rather than performance. But if you manage to lose to Zillions, you cannot claim to have much insight in the variant. That you do well agains humans does not mean a whole lot either. Humans play by pattern recognition, and they have to learn the patterns. Which is not possible for unknown variants, where there is nothing to learn from. So they are likely to just blunder along.

Computer programs are not hndicapped by this. They are equally stupid with respect to orthodox and un-orthodox pieces alike. But they can compensate for this by deep search through millions of positions. Therefore I would believe the conclusions of a computer program much sooner than that of a human without real experience in the particuar game. Especially of a program that is some 1000 Elo stronger than Zillions. If you are that much stronger, you must do something right...

Unless someone can show he masters the variant so well, that he can easily beat the engine, of course. Then his words would carry some clout.