[SoftwareBug2.0]

I can think of a couple of reasons that cyclers did well:

1) There is no weak matchup. There's no set of opposing robots that is your cryptonite. If you have a FCS, for example, your point output changes dramatically depending on the quality of defense.

2) Reliability. Cyclers are mechanically simpler than a floor pickup or anything with a climber, and on par with a FCS. So an alliance made of cyclers would be more reliable than anything but an alliance of three full court shooters.

These two weeknesses are compounded by the fact that championship is 5 rounds of eliminations. Playing five rounds of eliminations is very different than qualifications. If you have a robot that scores 100 pts 80% of the time that might not be as good as a robot that scores 50 pts 100% of the time. If you're the robot that scores 100 pts 80% of the time, it's probably for one of two reasons:
1) The robot fairs poorly against certain types of defenders, or
2) It sometimes has mechanical problems.

In the first case this is bad because it's correlated with who your opponent is. That means if you lose one against a certain set of opponents you're more even more likely to lose again than would be expected based on the overall strengths of the alliances. And since you have to win 2 of 3 against each set of opponents, it doesn't matter how thoroughly you may have crushed your earlier opponents, there's a matchup you can't handle you're done.

The second case, that of mechanical problems is also made worse during eliminations due to the reduced turn-around time between matches. And again it's worse not only because the matches are close together but because the matches that are close together are likely to be the ones that add to each other. So if a robot breaks enough to be out for two matches the odds are pretty good that those two matches are against the same opponents, which again means that it's more likely to cause an alliance to get itself eliminated than if there were just two random matches for which it was broken.

It may sound like I don't like the tournament format, but I do and I probably wouldn't change it much if it was up to me. It's just interesting how tournament format changes what kind of robot you want even with the game kept the same.