[Tetraman]

Someone attempting to dismantle a bomb isn't going to take a one minute break just because the timer on the bomb randomly increased by one minute. They would take that additional time to work on dismantling the bomb. Same with FIRST robotics - if you give all teams additional time, the students and mentorship are going to do everything in their power to utilize that extra time by default rather than spending the extra time to relax their schedule.

In a perfect FIRST world, every FIRST team would be given a total of 240 work hours over the course of 45.5 days to build a robot. The robot must be bagged either by a) the end of the 240 hours or b) the end of the 45.5 days - whichever comes first. Teams could be able to utilize the 240 hours how they wish to ensure the students and mentors can work within their own time constraints and also work the same number of hours as every other team. (If you are wondering, I got 240 hours by suggesting that every team works 5 hours every weekday and 10 hours every saturday during the traditional 6 week build season + 10 hours to round it to a slick number.)

But obviously we are not in a perfect world and cheating (either purposeful or accidental) is an obvious problem. Additionally, would you consider a single student/mentor designing a robot part at home in CAD be "part of your hours"...lots of issues to the hourly limit. However that would be the Perfect System if the world worked correctly.