Ahhh, I believe you may have been the guy I spoke to in person about this as we were gearing up for the final matches at WPI, trying to get our autonomous program working. We were happy to be a part of the winning alliance with you guys. By the way, we have a working autonomous at this point, though we can't score two tubes during autonomous as you can
To be honest, I really wish I had known about how to use the PID Controller before. The documentation either just seemed really shoddy (no offense to whoever wrote it) or I kind of didn't have enough knowledge at the time as to how I should be interpreting said documentation. At that point, one of our engineers just decided it'd be better to write it ourselves, but I guess it was good because I got to learn how PID actually works.
But in any case, if we ever have servo systems as complex as this, we will definitely be using PID Controller. It makes things so much easier... Although, homing / calibrating the machine still seems necessary, in case the pots somehow move. We have loads of gearing and our pots are kind of held in place by the good old piece of paper trick. So they tend to slip around when they are worked on.
Thanks for the other replies, too. This clarifies a LOT about PID!