[Cory]

It's already a 16 week build season, even if people want to pretend that it's only 6.

If you want to be great (or even really good) it's almost impossible to work only 6 weeks and then stop. We took maybe 5 days off total between kickoff and championships. Our technical mentors all put in over 50 hours/week every single week from kickoff to championships. It's hardly something to be proud of and we can't possibly sustain another year like this again, but that's what it took for us to get the 2013 robot to where it ended up.

If we didn't have to build two robots and only had to perfect one robot we would put in less time on the whole.

If you think the six weeks is saving you from yourselves I don't think it is. You've made the decision (either financial or personal to your team) not to build a practice bot. Presumably if we went to an "open" competition you could continue to make the same decision and bag the robot after six weeks, lock it in a mentor's garage, etc.