[Rich Olivera]

At the end of the day, I think all teams crave success on the field. Few things are as inspiring as being directly rewarded for your hard work. As Jim pointed out, Elaborate Qualifying Schemes like the Coopertition bridge offer low-end teams only a slightly better shot at tasting this kind of success. This approach is dangerous and, in my mind, low end teams lose more opportunity for inspiration than they gain.
To illustrate my point, let say you just decided to take up the sport of golf. You can take two approaches: you can have fun with the sport and not count scores accurately or you can be brutally honest with yourself when counting your scores. If you take 12 strokes on a particular par 5 and give yourself a bunch of mulligans to lower your score, you will not know if you improved the next time you play the hole. However, If you were brtually honest with yourself the first time out and you were to shoot a 9 on that par 5 the next time out, then this can motivate you to stick with the sport. In other words, accurately tracking your progress can be another source of motivation/inspiration.
When FIRST clouds the game objectives on the field, It becomes hard to benchmark your teams performance versus the rest of the field. It becomes harder to track your progress from one year to the next. A low end team might, on average, only get half the score of an elite team one year. Scoring 75% of what an elite team can score the next year can be motivating/inspiring. This cannot be objectively measured in quals this year when the elite team spends half the match more concerned with the coopertition bridge than scoring points. Without elaborate qualifying shemes, teams can point to incremental objective progress and claim success. The current system makes it hard to define success as anything other than winning an event or an award. To me, this is bad for FRC.