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After all that discussion about Track 1, I'd like to play around on the
other set of tracks. With luck I won't get run over. 

I see several parts to this [or maybe more]. One area is alternate
chesses. The next chess is actually a very-close-to-FIDE alternate chess.
Some alternate chesses have names like Shogi or Makruk or Xiang Qi.
Eurasian Chess is an alternate chess that is close to western chess. There
are many games that are nowhere close to any national or larger chess but
nonetheless are serious, high-quality games. Several designers' games pop
into my head, but not wishing to name too many names, I'll try to
generalize about styles, looking at them from the viewpoint of new pieces
introduced. 

First, you've got games that introduce no new pieces, but re-arrange, add
to, subtract from, move them differently, and put them on different boards.
Some, like Fischer Random, are serious, others, like Switching or
Extinction, are strictly for fun; definite Track 2s. 

Next, games that introduce 1 new piece. These games' 'strategy' is to
be as chesslike as possible, in general. Chancellor and Janus are 2 'type
specimens' of this sort of game. These are all track 1 games, until you
get to the more 'outrageous' pieces. And I'll end this post with a
little digression on the pieces used here. 

The most common extra pieces are N+B, N+R, and N+Q, the 'long-range
trio' of western combination pieces. However, it is gratifying to see a
number of designers using short-range pieces. The DWAF, which moves 1 or
jumps straight over a neighbor square to the 2nd square, is a very nice
piece in this role, and just might make the bigger jump into being used
more often. However, other, more exotic pieces - pieces with unusual move
or capture modes - switch any of these games that contain them from track
1 to track 2. I speculate that the eastern-style pieces used in Eurasian
Chess, the cannon and the arrow, are right on the cusp of what western
orthochess players will accept. That the cannon already exists in a major
game, and the pieces are so similar to the western bishop and rook, are
reasons I believe the pieces could be acceptable to western players.