[Tom Line]

It's all part of strategy - which is a huge part of FIRST.

One of our rookie teams had just enough knowledge to build a defensive toaster with a arm to drop the bridge. They were extremely proud that they consistently had one of the top balance scores.

I might argue that the 'point' of the game isn't necessarily what you think it is. In 2007, the majority of the time was spent hanging tubes - but most of the time robots on other robots won the match.

In 2009, the point of the game was to shoot balls into other people's trailers. Yet if I remember correctly, good human players consistently scored on par with robots.

In 2011, for the first 4 weeks of the season, a fast Minibot guaranteed a 85%+ win rate. In fact, a team on the World Championship Winning alliance was picked because they had the fastest minibot at Worlds.