[Bongle]

Some habits of highly effective teams:
-Year-round meetings for training and development. You don't want the first time you build a certain design concept (scriptable autonomous, telescoping arms, forklifts, mechanums, etc) to be during the competitive build season. You should have already tried it out and noted the advantages/disadvantages

-Consistent core mentors, as said above. High schools have a maximum memory of 4 years. Mentors that are around consistently allow your team to "remember" designs that did or didn't work. They also have the advantage of greater age, education, and experience.

-Spend some time designing at the outset, but get that design built fast - by week 3 or so. Spend a few weeks running it until it breaks, then build it better/faster/stronger. Last year we managed a week or so of testing, and in that week we discovered a bunch of design components that overheated, or were too slow, or were too hard to change, and we had fixes ready for our first competition. 3 weeks of that style of upgrading and you end up with a top-end robot. As soon as a component is built, see if you can start testing it. Glue it to a wall, bolt it to the floor, just get it moving so you can find out how it's going to fail.

-Get driver practice. I'll bet that if I drove 1114's robot this year, it wouldn't matter how amazing it was - I'd be lucky to score a tube. Drivers can make an average robot great, and a great robot unstoppable. The top-end teams have their drivers training with their practice robots every night, just like a sports team.

-Don't forget programmers: Just like drivers, a control program can be a force multiplier for your robot and can make a good robot great or a great robot an uncontrollable mess. This is another advantage of getting the robot built quick or having a 2nd robot built: your programmers can iteratively improve their program, fix bugs, and develop debugging/logging tools.

-Build 2 robots. Especially with the withholding limit rules, that means your iterative-upgrading process can now last all the way until your competition as you can test your 2nd robot to failure, then upgrade it. It probably only costs 50% more than building one robot, in terms of time and money.

The truly elite teams are the ones that can do all these things (and all the other things in the thread) very well year after year. Some of them take money (double robots, year-round meetings to some extent), some of them just take time, planning and effort (mentor recruiting, year-round meetings, driver practice, building fast)