[pfreivald]

With the electrical problems in our shooter, we ended up going pure defense + bridge throughout the qualifiers. Not to toot the octocanum horn too much, fender bots didn't stand a chance once teleop started. 340 used an alliance robot to pin us long enough to get past us, and scored three balls (6 points) in teleop once -- that was the most successful fenderbot against our defense. We reduced 191 to three and zero points in two qualifying matches, where without defense they were getting 20-ish points from the fender (plus bridges).

Against key shooters all we could do was passive defense -- ball denial -- and we got some penalty points for our team a few times doing that (while incurring no penalties ourselves throughout FLR). It's worth noting that 191's ability to shoot from the key got better and better throughout qualifiers.

It's most especially worth noting that we lost in the quarterfinals specifically because passive defense isn't enough to reliably win games against even reasonably good key shooters.

So my experience agrees with your analysis: defense cripples fender bots, but it's simply not enough against key bots.