[Bongle]

A lot of it comes down to speed and iteration: most teams finish at least part of their robot a few days before ship, use it, and it breaks so they improve it. Then it's time to crate or bag the robot, so that's all the improvement you do.

Powerhouse teams got to that stage weeks before you did, and so have found problems or places to improve, improved them, and so end up with a much better robot overall.

2702 example: we had our robot completely done about a week before ship this year. In that week, we fixed a huge reliability problem with our ball-lift, discovered and fixed an encoder problem on the shooter, discovered the robot was too tall/tippy and shortened it, changed the drive code for further tip resistance, and redesigned the pickup software. The robot we bagged was at least 2x as good as it had been the week before. Now imagine 2-3 weeks of that kind of improvement, and you have a powerhouse robot.

Also they've got really smart and experienced mentors and students, so their first iteration may be better than yours. Plus they often have many sponsors, so they can iterate faster than you. But both of those things a smaller team can, over time, acquire.