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Thank you for the comments and the rating, Mr King [and please call me Joe, I'm not a very formal person]. It seems I may have been too pessimistic in my view when this was written; there are many very nice shortrange pieces in the world of chessvariants. What they really need is good promotion in an advertising sense, rather than a chess sense [though, as Scirocco shows, they can be promoted both ways]. 

What I have tried to do is show that short range does not necessarily mean weak. How weak is the king, as a piece? A pair of moderately powerful pieces, the NAF and the NDW, the shortrange analogs of the archbishop and chancellor, moving only 2 squares max, can drive the king to oblivion very quickly in a game of Great Shatranj, for example. There are a lot of simple, easy to use and understand shortrange pieces that move 2, 3 or 4 squares at most, that do very well on any size board. They provide a variety to the games that the 'vast array' of infinite sliders doesn't.