Has anyone thought/experimented of a variant that works a bit like the starting phase of Risk: pawns are as they are classically, but players take turns in the beginning phase placing their other pieces in their respective bottom/upper file.
I've heard this referred to as either Placement Chess or Bronstein's Chess (after the GM who reportedly suggested it). It's available to play on https://pychess.org, where it's called Placement Chess.
My point not being that that is a link straight to the exact thing you've described, but that if you ask that site for all the variants it has with a blank search [1], the first 500 variants on file (give or take some administrative garbage) gets you the variants starting with a number and up to "Avalanche Chess" alphabetically... that is, you can't even get all the way through the As before the search bails out.
