I think the wider gameplay area is okay so long as the game accomodates to make things fair - ie usually for 1 player games only unless all users have the same view. Or let the other players have the option to see the same shape display and to see the same amount of game world, perhaps with black bars at the top and bottom to do so. For something like a 1 player sidescrolling shootemup it would be fine, and for splitscreen modes it would be great to have a bigger screen area for each player.
While I think the detection of the desktop resolution may work for a large percentage of cases I am not comfortable that it covers everyone or even as many as it might seem. I am guessing maybe 75-80% at most, which to me is not enough. Just detecting the desktop isn't accurate enough. How would you go about removing stretched modes from a list of display modes when you cannot tell which ones they are? And how do you know that the desktop resolution has anything whatsoever to do with the physical space it takes up no the screen? You can't.
While I think the detection of the desktop resolution may work for a large percentage of cases I am not comfortable that it covers everyone or even as many as it might seem. I am guessing maybe 75-80% at most, which to me is not enough. Just detecting the desktop isn't accurate enough. How would you go about removing stretched modes from a list of display modes when you cannot tell which ones they are? And how do you know that the desktop resolution has anything whatsoever to do with the physical space it takes up no the screen? You can't.