[Taylor]

Holy Straw Man argument, Chris.
The "driving circles" challenge was certainly served and, to our knowledge, never met. It calls for (paraphasing) an inferior (mecanum drive) team defeating a superior (traction drive) team simply by virtue of its drive train. But then you state that only holistically inferior teams would use mecanums in competition in the first place.
As coach of our 2011 mecanum-driven bot, I noticed during practice and competition that it could perform maneuvers that a traditional (read: 4-wheel or 6-wheel, non-crab/swerve) robot could not. This maneuverability allowed us freedom of simplicity in our overall design, and the ways we implemented the mecanum drive were not evident in middle-of-the-field play - partly due to the limited access given to defending teams, partly due to the fact that we went to one event, and partly due to the fact that the only time we were actively defended, THAT ROBOT HAD MECANUM DRIVE TOO! (3487, who rode their mecanum drive all the way to St. Louis as Rookie All Stars).
Mecanum drive trains are not the optimal system for every challenge, but they do have merit. Swerve/Crab is undoubtedly better, but that arguably takes years of practice and refining to make decent. We had our mecanum drive running early Week 2 of build season, with no previous experience.
AndyMark does not make or promote sucky stuff they leave that to banebots. They've sure got a lot of iterated mecanum wheels, though.

To go back to the OP - it is pretty funny. As is the payback.