[Jim Zondag]

Personally, I find this entire subject to be complete foolishness. The FIRST rule book specifically tells us not to "Lawyer the rules", but then FIRST turns around and starts applying unneeded legalistic interpretations on an engineering technicality. FIRST is doing the very thing that they tell us not to do. This is just plain foolishiness. We are engineers, not lawyers. The fact the the rules have been reduced the the statement "you must have packaging with the word 'light' in the product description" is hilarious. How about a little common sense here? I have no idea why on earth FIRST is choosing to impose a rule like this on the teams.

If it is not a competitve advantage and it is not a safety risk, it should not be a rule, plain and simple. "Because we say so" might be sound logic for 6 year olds, but not for engineers.

Back in the 90s, the rule book was filled with all sorts of stupidity like this. Many of the older teams worked very hard with FIRST for years to get most of these type of rules removed for the big robots; it seems the new leadership of FIRST have lost sight of the reasoning behind many of the decisions we made back then.