The more I've thought about the discussion in 'that other thread', the more I've warmed up to the
suggestion by "Ike" to allow some Out-of-bag time each week. We get 6 hours here in Michigan before each 2 day event (regular district event, not MSC or CMP), which gives 2 or 3 6-hour chunks.
This approach still imposes the "Deadline", preventing you from building your robot after week 1 events, giving everyone a breather, and minimizing the need for a practice bot (although they still have value since you only unbag before competitions).
The absolute biggest advantage that this "personal" time affords is that the time is much more efficiently used than competition time. At a competition, you have a lot of people around, and you must share practice areas, machine shops, etc. At CMP we spent TWO HOURS waiting in line for one 10 minute practice session where we could leave our robot in place and test the shooter, if we had the opportunity to do this before crating the bot, we would have saved a ton of stress! Events are not a good place to develop even small features, and the more people who attempt to do so, the less able everyone is to do so, due to shared resources.
Providing a certain amount of unbag time will reduce the crowding of practice facilities, reduce stress at events, and improve the competitiveness of events. Limiting that time will keep teams from going overboard once competition season begins (even though many already do with practice bots). It also lets you develop features that you cannot test on the practice field (like center-line autonomous).
Those that are leery of unbag time leading to making everyone more competitive, based on how much time they spend building, ignore one important thing:
Every design has a plateau, where more time/effort will net minimal gain. I would rather see every team reach that plateau. It kills me to see designs that are really cool, but only "almost work".
And of course, 6 Weeks + 6 hrs each week after that, so 6 would still remain the perfect number
