[Tom Line]

Always design your robot with the belief that there will not be two other robots on your alliance. Any time you rely on team members for a portion of your strategy, you will have matches that are completely outside your ability to control and you will lose.

That pretty much segways into all the design choices that we made this year. We can't do everything, but we don't rely on our alliances partners to be able to do anything.

It doesn't always work - this year is a perfect example of a year that is incredibly hard to do everything, much less do everything well. So you pick the functions that you least care about and won't really affect how your strategy plays out. I'm a big proponent of strategy-driven design, rather than design driven strategy.

That should answer your question on which direction we picked, in a round-about sort of way.