[PiltdownMan]

FIRST Choice has served and continues to serves my team very poorly. We have never gotten anything particularly useful from the FIRST Choice program (FC). For the last 4 weeks there certainly has been little available that we can use on the designs for the current season. That is because the things that we could use to actually compete with are provided in such small numbers that we can’t get them. So now we have 100 FC points that are essentially worthless.
The bottom line is we now need to stop worrying about what we need for a given year’s competition and choose the most valuable/scarcest items. We have to indulge in bad engineering, bad sportsmanship, bad logistics just to compete. Not gracious/not professional.
FIRST needs to design a system that makes more sense or redesign the FC system. They could set up a rotation system wherein the choice of the high value targets is limited over time or some other such concept.

(I personally would be less offended if the program was killed and we just had to buy those items. At least it would be an honest system. I would be happy to contribute ideas or time to solving it. It has already occupied too much of my time.)