[pfreivald]

We mentors already give up a significant portion of our lives--indeed, many prospective mentors (and/or their spouses) consider it an unreasonable portion of our lives to the point that they are unwilling to participate in FIRST--so that our kids will be as successful as they are willing to work to be.

Extending the build season will result in our having to give up even more of our lives, even if it means that we work less nights per week during that time. Indeed, this is true even if we put in less total hours over those weeks.

The thing is, we mentors do other things. (I, for example, have a wife and pets I like to spend time with. I keep bees. I'm on a school board. My lawn does not mow itself, and my house will not fix itself. I write books (and have a contract to fulfill before the end of summer). I edit books (for actual money). Some mentors coach sports and direct plays and run marathons and draw comics and flip houses and fix old cars...) These other activities, like FIRST, often require significant sustained effort over a period of time in order to do them properly, and they already interfere with one another to a significant degree. (For example, if I try to do FIRST and finish a novel in the same three month time period, I will never do any work around the house or spend any time whatsoever with The Redhead(tm) or my pets--which is of course unacceptable.)

This means that they are not activities that can be reasonably accomplished at the same time as FIRST build season, even if the hours-per-week requirement of build season is relaxed.

People keep posting about burnout, as if what's happening is that mentors are literally collapsing from exhaustion, forcing their too-understanding spouses to drag their dessicated, dehydrated, swarf-and-pizza-grease-covered bodies home to rehabilitate in time for the next season. This is not the case (most of the time; for most of us). What's happening is that we're reaching our personal limits of what we're willing to sacrifice for our FIRST kids.

I already dislike the impact that the withholding allowance has had on my life--I wish it were smaller or nonexistent--but at least it puts a practical limit on the number of things we can iterate. Eliminating bag and tag opens up iteration to every mechanism, every bit of functionality; and anyone claiming that this will result in less "mentor burnout" is kidding themselves.

I want to be an "elite" team. I want The Grapes of Wrath to inspire that same level of jaw-dropping awe/abject terror on the playing field that OP and Simbotics and Miss Daisy and the Poofs and all the other truly incredible teams do. I sacrifice a great deal to try to make that happen...

I don't know. Maybe some of you are smarter than I am. Maybe you're more dedicated. Maybe you're better organized, need less sleep, have no pets or children, hate your wife and don't want to see her unless you have to, and maybe you have no interests whatsoever other than FIRST. But all of that is irrelevant as to whether or not any given mentor has reached their limit on what they're willing to sacrifice to field a competitive robot.

Just please, stop pretending that extending the build season will result in less sacrifice. It won't.