[Chris is me]

There are thousands of students who prepare for FRC without FTC experience who go on to play with the best in the world. "FTC is the single best thing our students can do to prepare for the FRC season" is just not true.

That doesn't mean it's not a good thing, or not a key component in many robotics programs, but the idea that FTC is a "magic bullet" for FRC preparedness is just false.

I think ideally, a fall training program should accomplish a few things. New students should have some training and experience with their preferred discipline (fabrication, prototyping, design, programming, etc). They should have some experience at some sort of competitive robotics event. Finally they should start to get an idea of "how to win" - how great hard work is correlated with success. FTC is a way to accomplish these things. VRC is another. Going to a fall off-season and running training seminars is yet another. There are quite a lot of ways to make this work.

Personally, I really think that FTC has moved away in the past several years from being an accessible and simple robotics competition to a difficult, complex, custom-machining-required cousin of FRC. When all you needed was COTS parts and your imagination, FTC showed such strong promise... But now it's far more of a cost, time, and experience commitment. I guess it's a bit more relatable to FRC, but at the expense of new students being able to leap right in.