Personally, I liked the flexibility of the of the rules as far as the dimensions and shapes it allowed. It was quite interesting to see how some teams took advantage of the rules to come up with everything from very square machines to unusually elongated ones (I'm looking at you
326)
That said, the smaller total perimeter was, in my opinion, a huge headache for building the robot and even more-so for finding space for electronics. Particularly for teams like ours that didn't take advantage of using a non-standard frame shape, the smaller overall size was a pain.
I'd personally like to see FIRST revert to the previous max frame perimeter size, but keep the flexibility of this years shape and dimension rules.