[Bongle]

Pretty burned-out mentor here. I had too much non-FIRST stuff going on this year, and found that robotics was a bit of a chore. I'm always nonplussed about build season, but this year felt really bad. Between work, a start-up, and a girlfriend, I was massively overstretched. Our main mentor is fortunate enough to be retired, but as a working stiff I'm finding less and less time for FIRST.

The 6-week season absolutely must be kept, and I'd be happy if they eliminated the withholding allowance too. Top-end teams will build practice bots, but top-end teams will always find a way to be better whether the season is long or not. I had to skip out on the mid-february-until-first-competition build season this year, and I felt awful about it. I shouldn't feel like I'm abandoning my team by not showing up after build season.

Here's the problem:
-Extending the build season would certainly raise the floor of performance, but it would also raise the ceiling. Teams that perform near the bottom now would perform near the bottom with an official 9-week build season. Their robot might be better at the game, but everyone else's robot would be better at it too. Human psychology and satisfaction isn't interested in absolute performance, it's interested in relative performance. And coming dead last feels just as bad whether your robot can score (9 weeks) or not (6 weeks).
-Put another way, the build season is a bit of an arms race: if everyone spends 3 more weeks, then that's 3 more weeks of neglected homework, children, and jobs for essentially zero gain. The extra 3 weeks will probably not gain you any ground on any other teams, because they'll also be working for an extra 3 weeks.
-Teams can't really say "well we're just going to work for 6 weeks", because that guarantees that they'll get beaten by the teams that are willing to sacrifice their non-FIRST lives more.
-If FIRST were to make the build season officially longer, they'd probably make the games proportionally more difficult, so you'd still have teams unable to perform any of the tasks. It's not like we'd have 9 weeks to achieve the same bar we have now: the bar would be higher.


Here's a proposal to enforce a short build season: have the drive station software stop working between the end of build season until thursday of the competitions that that team is registered for, along with the reinstatement of "raw materials only" being brought to competitions. Boom: no more practice robots, no more february->march build season, no more 4-months of daily meetings to be competitive.