I personally had a great time as St. Louis even though our team had problems with penalties for several reasons, we all had fun. We had a lot of fun at the talent show giving Andy Baker a standing ovation because of his excellent MC'ing, and I was told that several members of our team had even more fun stalking him after the talent show
This was my first year at a championship, and, as I was in the pit almost the entire time, it was different than that of the rest of the team.
Pros -
-Dome fields were easy to view
-Walk from Pits to Dome (to watch games) was quick
-The Dome is near quite a few hotels, and eateries, so walking to and from the dome was completely viable.
-The Concert was a lot of fun
-The walk to and from the pit fields our pit was convenient
-Paper airplanes.
-Paper airplanes with names and phone numbers.
-The talent show
-The "First Conversation" show, I was the second guy of the "guys in the blue shirts" to talk, it was very interesting as a "do'er" to hear what Amir said about getting the bureaucrats to agree with doing more mentor based education in public schools. For those who weren't there, the answer to the question, "How did you get the bureaucrats...to agree," was, (paraphrased) See, That's the interesting part...I didn't...I did it, then basically challenged them to tell me that what I was doing wasn't the answer to the problem at hand, and my school has now embraced FIRST into the culture as much as, if not more than, any other sport.
Cons-
-Pit fields. Everything about them other than the walk there as someone who knew where they were going was bad, in my opinion. Trying to get family who didn't know/understand the pit rules into the pits and to the fields was atrocious. The seating was horrid, we only had our scouts in the stands during our matches, unless teams were gracious enough to harbor us for 5-6 minutes (thanks to the team from mexico that let me and a few of our pit crew sit with them during some of the qualification matches).
-Hard to find standing screens
-Lack of room in pit isles
-The walk from the pits to the dome was impossible to explain unless you had someone show you the route (or you took the elevator)
-Load-in. The lady who was in charge of the gate we were at was misinformed or something, as she kept telling all the teams that they could only bring in what they could carry, (aka, no rolling tables, carts, etc. etc.) and even after we were given our wrist bands we were told that we had to go through the small entrance carrying what we could, so that the lady could count us off her list. After about 30-45 minutes all of this was sorted out, and the lady in charge was very nice in-the end, but some of the handling of the event was quite unprofessional. Also, finding an inch or two of water in our electrical crate was very concerning.
-ROBOT! - I'm a supporter of people yelling robot ONCE if there is a large group of people in front of you and you are behind on queing, I am not okay with you yelling robot every 10 seconds when there is an obvious clear lane in front of you.
-Even though I think it is awesome that we are getting the word of FIRST out there, I think the Concert was a disappointment due to the lack of seating in reasonable places (section 405 was like watching a bunch of ants move around on the floor) and some of our team felt like the show was more for TV than it was for us.
-Chairman's Award at the Concert - I feel I am obliged to agree with everyone else on this, and restate their claims, this was a serious oversight to the people who were planning this.
-The volume of the pit announcer was way too loud. You could not yell over the PA unless you were yelling into the person's ear next to you.
-Crates. Trying to get our crate at the end of the day was way to hard. Trying to get them to take the crate away was way to hard. (actually didn't happen until after we left Wednesday night, and some pit lanes were completely blocked off by so many robot crates
-Pit layout. Unless you looked at the image before-hand, it was really hard to determine if some of the teams in Galileo were in Galileo or in Archimedes. The Curie/Archimedes inspection tables were very confusing at first as well. The stickers on the floor needed to be much more visible for people with robot carts, or just people in general to see.
These were just what I could come up with at 10:30pm at night, I felt like I had a good time. The cons really do detract from the experience though, and the pit fields were almost as bad as I had thought. Hopefully they can see some of the feedback on CD and improve next year.
PS- Sorry for the wall-of-text :/