Confusion on What Agents Want

*laugh* Today must be my day for confusion. The Donald Maass Literary Agency is now posting a monthly listing of plots they would be interested in seeing. To quote, "This month we’ve devised a list of hypothetical novels the premise of which would by itself pique our interest." For fantasy plots, they list:

• A Huck Finn-like fantasy featuring a raft trip down the Mississippi, with magic.
• An African-American Lord of the Rings.

So here we have a suggestion to write a journey-focused novel and a quest novel. Agents normally say that they get so many quest and/or journey novel queries that they practically get an automatic rejection letter. Does this mean that they would be interested in my novel if I mentioned that it's set in a Japan-influenced setting? Or that they like epic quests or humorous journeys after all? It would have been more helpful to me if they said what, exactly, they found appealing about these ideas. Oh, well. At least they're trying to be helpful.