If you're in variance land, you're not in a good place unless your municipality has a strong track record of being easy about that sort of thing however a lot of it boils down to neighbors.

Smoothing them over in advance is strong medicine in case you need to apply for a variance but variances aren't something just trivially written off as a gimme. They can be a matter of life and death for a project.

Marvin Heemeyer drove a killdozer through the city of Granby, Colorado because the bureaucratic gunts wouldn't give him a variance for a property he owned.

If you have a project that rests on variance, you have to bang out that variance before anything else gets done unless you're a straight degenerate gambler or have some sort of inside line.

I 100% agree. But, I also think a lot of people have a skewed perception of how the variance process works for small projects (and especially residential projects) like this.

In many jurisdictions, you can make small changes to bulk zoning regulations (like moving a setback up to 20%) without even going through the variance process. Instead, you can make an appeal to the director of the planning commission and that person can effectively make a unilateral decision on the variance using a set of pre-defined criteria.

In fact, I just did one of these last year and was able to get a variance to move a setback on a residential custom home build 20% closer to the street. The entire process took about 5 weeks, and I was pretty much assured by the director of planning and zoning that it would be approved beforehand.

In other cases, even if you don't have a streamlined process, it's not overly difficult to determine upfront if a variance is likely to be granted or not. Most states based their variance laws on The Standard Zoning Enabling Act, which was defined back in the 1920's, so while there is definitely variability from state to state, for many states, the underlying definitions and requirements are very similar. If you have cooperative neighbors and can prove an "unnecessary hardship," in many states and locales, getting a variance isn't too risky.

Also, if you have a good engineer and attorney, case law can be your friend. It costs a bit upfront, but you can certainly get a reasonable idea if it would even be legal for local jurisdictions to refuse you a variance. Obviously, things get more complicated as projects get bigger and the impact on the neighborhood is larger -- I've never been involved in dealing with large scale or commercial variances -- but we're talking about a pretty straightforward residential variance aimed at allowing subdivision of a parcel here. If the zoning otherwise supports it, the neighbors are okay with it and the requested change isn't large, in my experience the risks aren't huge.

All that said, I've only done this a few times in a few places, so I'm certainly no expert. And like you, I'm aware of some of the high profile cases where things didn't go as smoothly as I've described above. I like to think those are more the exception than the rule...