YCHTT, I understood what you meant.
Try to imagine a starting position with Landlanes, for example in the Divided States Variant : how could you possibly conquer an opponent's nation with your very few starting units ? While you would advance towards his position, he could simply move *through* your lines and reach your territory. Lanes can only be blocked with many units, which players do not have during the early stages of the game.
As I wrote it before elsewhere (Global Press of
gameID=34121), in order to avoid early stalemate lines and too large Draws, the larger a variant is, the smaller the ratio between the number of spaces with SCs and the total number of land (and coastal) spaces should be.
What we need is to add non-SC land spaces in the larger variants, and for that, there is no need of Landlanes. Sealanes have the purpose of adding extra spaces without slowing down naval movement, which was a necessity since Selanes were designed in order to allow intercontinental expansion. There is no such a need on a very large land mass, where what we need is only to avoid early stalemate lines that lead to massive Draws.