[Chris Hibner]

I find Jon's blog on this topic very interesting, because his self-conflicting feelings on this topic is almost identical to how I feel.

One thing I've learned in all of my years in FIRST is that even though you hand someone something on a sliver platter, it doesn't mean they're going to accept it. A couple of great examples:

1) Kris posted that link back to a thread I created in 2002. That year, there was a way to win the game via a chokehold strategy. That thread that I created was a response to another thread in which the chokehold strategy was was revealed to everyone, and then went on to describe how to make a robot to execute the chokehold strategy. I thought that everyone that read that thread would instantly realize how they could easily win the game and that everyone would stop what they were doing and build the chokehold robot. I thought all robots at the championship would be very similar. As it turns out, that thread was mostly a thought experiment as virtually no one changed what they were doing.

2) Look at line-following autonomous this year. I am amazed at the number of robots that are capable scorers that just sit still in the autonomous period. FIRST gave everyone a working, off-the-shelf autonomous solution, and virtually no one did it.

It surprised me in 2002 that not more teams tried the chokehold. I rationalized that as it took too much effort for teams to make the change.

It REALLY surprises me that teams didn't use the canned line tracking code with their robots.

Anyway, I guess my point is that perhaps I overreact when I think everyone is going to have the same minibot in St. Louis.