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Along a similar vein, is there any preference given to teams that haven't won the award before? One thing I observed at Oregon this year was that both the chairman's and EI were given to teams that had not previously won either award. In fact, in both cases, EI and Chairmans were the third awards the team had won in their history, and 2012 was the first time either had won a judged award since 2007 and 2009 respectively.
This isn't meant to diminish the efforts of either one of those teams. On the contrary, I think it's great to see that FIRST rewards the efforts of a variety of teams who can take the award back to their sponsors. It was just something of a curiosity to see those two teams chosen out of a field where there were many previous EI and RCA winning teams who arguably did more in their communities.
I'm not saying that the prestigious awards shouldn't factor in a desire to "share the wealth", but it is something that has puzzled me.