[WizenedEE]

I think that from this thread alone we can see how devalued programming is. People are saying, "We shouldn't put teams at a huge disadvantage just because they don't have good programmers," which people seem to agree with, but nobody would agree with, "We shouldn't put teams at a huge disadvantage just because they don't have good engineers/mechanical folk."

I really like the idea of having an autonomous mode that gets you small points for something small and big points for something big. Last year, it was easy to score if you were in the front zone since the goal was relatively large from that distance, so a novice team could just have a dead reckoning program that was dead easy. Then, the better teams could score three goals from the far zone, which was much harder. Sadly, the whole thing was ruined by the lack of bonus points for autonomous. (It would take about three seconds for the drivers to do the same thing that autonomous did.)