[Tom Line]

Prototyping is a good idea in some cases. However, being extremely prescriptive in rule setting (i.e. - things MUST be prototyped) is not a good idea.

Some ideas don't need to be prototyped, and some frankly can't be accurately and quickly prototyped. Don't get so hung up on the "MUST prototype" theme that you throw out good ideas. That is where your engineers and experienced members should step in. Rely on experience. Prototype where necessary due to inexperience.

Sometimes people's feelings get hurt during this process because they have what they think is a good idea, but it gets shot down. Part of the engineering process is learning to move on to the ideas that were accepted and try to make them better. That's the point of a weighted objective table: to try to take the feelings out of it. Accepting someone else's idea as your own is hard, but it's also a key part of being an engineer.

Let's face it, in a perfect world we would prototype and test each idea in full scale and prove which is better. In FIRST we don't have that luxury, so we rely on experience.

"A part that is cut by an inexperienced student will not be able to align properly unless properly cut, leaving holes when placing the parts together."

Did poorly cut and assembled parts affect your result last year? I know many teams who are incredibly successful and rely on hand building robots without fancy CNC machines (or even mills and lathes, for that matter). It comes down to a question of robust strategy and robust design. And if a hand-cut part doesn't fit, it only take a few minutes to have that student do it again..... and learn from it. You would probably shudder to see a lot of the robots on Einstein up close.

Building another robot is an incredible undertaking, and has very little value if it isn't functionally identical to the first. Using different materials will result in a robot that acts differently. That's a bad thing when working on programming and practicing driving. If you're stretching your budget already, I'd recommend heartily against it.

Every team has a different view of what FIRST offers. If your team as a group disagrees with you, then pushing them all to go in a different direction probably isn't going to work out very well. See if you can't focus on one aspect and improve that, then change something else next year. Judging from your complaints, I'd say that your team would definitely benefit from lengthening your strategy sessions and spending a bit more time on design selection (weighted objective tables).