"None of the teams are going to say "Today, we take this specific friday off - the team will not meet on friday during week 5 out of 7." That's scary."
Actually Evan, our team did exactly this...after a rough 2010 build season when we tried to do the impossible (lift 2 robots along with our bot) and finally figured out that the points weren't worth the effort, so we decided to take off all Fridays since that season and we also banished all-nighters, rarely working until midnight these last 3 seasons. We scaled back and set smarter work schedules, work fewer and shorter days and as our record attests, it hasn't seemed to hurt our end product.
A bag free season could allow us to spread out the work days even better and IMO further reduce the burn out potential while still maintaining a top notch program/robot. As stated in an earlier post, it just takes
discipline.