[gotrobot?]

Carl - As irritated and frustrated as you may be now you'll probably find yourself equally frustrated with the cold, bracing jump into CAD. I suggest you take a two-prong approach: have your team get up to speed with CAD but while that's happening do some research and study real-world arm/lifting mechanisms from industry. Then do a brainstorm and see if there are ideas worth combining and prototyping. Stay away from the TETRIX kit for now and just build 2D and 3D scale models with cardboard, push pins, and tape. There's a lot of learning from this approach and it will save your team lot of trial and error once the engineers move to the TETRIX platform.