**This represents my personal experience and opinions, not those of GRT 192**
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Originally Posted by Cory
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To risk an unproductive foray down a well-traveled path...
In my past experiences as a student on 192, I have noticed that the students directly involved in designing and building the robot or modeling the animation or otherwise contributing to team success in a very direct way [includes sponsorships etc] are an order of magnitude more interested and inspired by their time on the team than students who rarely contribute. One of my pet projects in leadership was finding the students on the 'outskirts' of the team and getting them involved throughout the year.
Of course being a student on GRT wouldn't be nearly as much fun or nearly as inspirational without the wide mentor and parent support we enjoy. GRT's robots are 100% student built. Our high-quality workmanship is a point of pride, and our team-members have put in the hours of practice to achieve it. We also have a machine shop better than most college shops, the culmination of 15 years of unwavering dedication from our lead mentor, and a number of mentors who make sure we don't hurt ourselves and break tools while we work.
This informs my opinion that a truly 100%-mentor-funded-built-and-troubleshot robot (that I doubt exists in modern FRC) is a disservice to the students on that team. As a team is more and more mentor driven I find it harder and harder to support them unconditionally. It's appropriate to have a happy medium, and I suspect many teams are closer to 'medium' than they would like to believe.
On-topic:
Pittsburgh's incidents are embarrassing and a darn shame. Some of my friends on a certain local team have experienced the same kind of ostracism, at last year's Nationals no less. ("How could a bunch of high school girls put together a bot that successful?" when I would love to recruit some of them for my old team.) I was shocked when I heard about it--I had no idea that kind of thing was going on, and if I see it in the future I'll try to step in.
I disagree with OP's emphasis on 'professionalism', primarily for the same reason I disagree with an emphasis on 'tolerance'--tolerating something still implies that the tolerated thing is bad. Taking the 'gracious' out of 'professionalism' would solve very little, after all.
Unfortunately I don't have a better replacement in mind yet, making this criticism pointless (don't criticize until you have a solution, right?); I will continue to think about it (probably after Finals are over this quarter) and try to post something more constructive later.