I've been watching this thread for a while now, and I completely understand the frustration - especially for all those teams just coming off of soooo many sleepless nights!!
Several good points have been made already. Karthik's was the earliest one that made a ton of sense, and Pete's more recently echoed my thoughts.
But here is another thought... many have been mentioning banning hammer throws, or only allowing a certain number of white disks to be thrown, or several other limitations that aren't quite as restrictive as the "only colored disks" ruling. The problem with this is that it places a lot more work on the referees... what happens if they miss "how" the frisbee was thrown because they were trying to watch a robot climb?, who is going to count how many white disks a human throws? I think this would just lead to more referee errors, and extend the problems.
Netting over the goals - this is a possibility, but the structures are already really really tall, and I think it would be hard to add onto the structures in such a way that it worked for all venues. Sure many of the Regionals have lights and everything rigged, but you don't want to hang nets that will be hammered by frisbees on expensive lighting. Plus District events (and offseasons) won't have anywhere near the same ability to rig. Making the structures taller with nets seems even more dangerous. I helped set up the home made field for the Rochester Rally and while it was a lot more stable than we would have expected, putting up really tall nets would have been tough.
For teams that are upset about the last 30 seconds, I'm really surprised that so many think that will be such a disadvantage. In reading strategies early on, it seemed like the clear advantage to floor collectors was in autonomous. I would be surprised to see more than a handful of robots that can get more than one cycle in the last 25 seconds of play (presumably it would take at least 5 seconds for 4 human thrown frisbees to be on the floor - and that assumes they all land within easy pickup range).
For the human players that put in a ton of practice... I do feel a bit bad for them, but I think they still have potential to win games that are close. In watching the preships, it seemed like it was possible that humans would score a lot more points than robots... and that doesn't really make this a robotics competition - it makes it a human competition with a robot component. I think the humans are just going to have to work harder at increasing their accuracy... before you could get away with mere chance... 2/20 was still two scored... now each disk has to really really count. Its a little more like last year where when you weren't bombarded by a high scorer, you had a limited number of balls in endgame, so each had to count. We still saw some amazing shots.
And for anyone wondering what the netting looks like, there may be more recent photos from any changes from Suffield or NH, but at Kickoff
they looked like this. They are right up next to the field.
In all - I get this change. At the Rally, there were points where we just had to tell the humans to stop throwing because it was getting dangerous to walk anywhere in the gym. And while I get the frustration, as others have said, I don't think its as detrimental to robot designs as many are making it out to be. In fact I'd wager that if we played an offseason half with and half without the change, we'd end up with nearly exactly the same scores robot-wise. As with every year, I think everyone is overestimating their ability to score as they haven't played against defense or with 6 robots on the field or with frisbees littering the field.
Hopefully everyone takes a breather, gets some sleep, and figures out how to play an amazing game!