What do you think of a "destination swap" format?

[speedypuzzlement]

Some chess tournaments force imbalanced starting positions (Fischer random chess, TCEC imbalanced openings) and making competitors swap sides. What do you think about a similar format for two-player Ticket To Ride? The rule additions would be:

• Encounters with an opponent would be grouped into pairs of games, swapping who goes first.

• For both games, you are shown the initial destinations dealt to your opponent, but not what they kept.

• For the second game, you and your opponent are dealt swapped initial destinations.

Note that BGA already supports the first rule addition. If you want skill in predicting destinations to be more heavily recognized, you can deal more destinations to each player and require them to keep at most 3. I think this would make it a lot easier to differentiate players of similar skill by minimizing the luck of initial destinations / who goes first. For something like the World Championship, it would also make the result more reproducible (for example, the outcome of 5 pairs in the new format might have the same statistical confidence as 20 games in the old format).

As an example, suppose player 1 goes first and receives [Seattle to New York, Vancouver to Montreal, Denver to El Paso] while player 2 goes second and receives [Boston to Miami, Kansas City to Houston, Chicago to New Orleans]. In the current format, I think player 1 would usually defeat player 2 if both players had equal skill. But in the swap format, player 2's "bad luck" in round 1 would become player 1's "bad luck" in round 2.

[ExaltedAngel]

While I like the concept, I don't think this is suitable for TTR because knowing what the initial set of objectives is, in most cases means knowing what the objectives taken are. Also at that point the luck factor is not reduced, but just concentrated (and probably increased) in the cards draw, because when you know exactly what the objectives of your opponent are, the only thing preventing you from blocking him is him drawing the needed colours before you do.

The format would be interesting in a couples competition where the same game is played at the same time by the two teammates. This, obviously would make sense only if there was a way to prevent the teammates from communicating, so not suitable for BGA.