Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I absolutely agree.  But I note several practical difficulties.

1) Which variants?  This also invites subquestions...how is a variant
recognized for official play, how is the list determined for a
championship series, how do we develop laws which cover the wide realm of
variants...
2) Should games such as shogi and xiangqi (or Western chess!), with their
own firmly established organizations, be considered as variants?
3) Should tournaments utilizing only one variant be counted, or only
events involving two or more?
4) How does one balance the variants in issuing ratings, given that player
proficiency is certain to vary across the spectrum of games?
5) Is there enough of an audience of variantists (who play more than one
or two games with some proficiency) to be credible or worthwhile?

Certainly as the contest guy here, I'm keenly interested in the idea you
raise.  But we'd have quite a road in front of us...

Glenn Overby

In each match, each player chooses his variant (which may be Orthochess),
and the two players send simultaneously their moves in four games (this
takes care of games which are a sure win for one side).
In a round-robin, win, draw and loss are valued the usual 1, 0.5 and 0,
and you can have the players share four points or have their scores
normalized to 1, 0.5 and 0.
In match play, first first win (in one variant) is awarded an extra 0.11,
and second first win (in the other variant) gets only 0.10, so this may
untie the match.