I don't make the rules, I just enforce them

If there's a Q&A answer tomorrow that says "Per R196, every robot must have a carrot dangling by a string to indicate the front of the robot", I'll make sure I bring some carrots for those teams that missed it! If Frank is reading this, I'd love to see this rule... inspectors get hungry when running around to different pits all day, and having a natural snack built into every robot would be awesome!
But in all seriousness, take a look at what the rule is attempting to accomplish. It's primary goal is to make climbing the tower a little more challenging, as that's really the only situation I've seen teams come close to hitting the limit. Part of climbing the tower involves the bumpers (how do you get them around the horizontal bars and avoid getting stuck?), so it only makes sense that, in this case, the bumpers are included in the 54" cylinder.