Much of our team has a similar opinion -- that Aerial Assist seems rather bland and marks a departure from the design elements of the games in the last few years:
- FIRST has been attempting to move to games that are easily accessible to an arbitrary audience -- like Rebound Rumble or Ultimate Ascent. This was in response to the inexplicable Logomotion where a person not in FIRST had a hard time understanding or getting excited about the game.
- FIRST has been moving towards more and more live scoring and penalties and it seems like a direct step back go back to referee scoring
- The last few games have seemed very well put together (Pyramid doubles as end game and lining up device, top of pyramid had climbing goals and shooting ones etc...) but this one has "missing pieces" -- There has to be another point to the truss and the goalie as the OP mentioned.
- Rules last year were very well written with few inconsistencies, this year we have quite a few weird things (what happens if a robot dies while holding the only ball? Not to mention the absolute mess that is the definition of possession that the poor referees have to call)
- Aerial assist does not do a good job of describing the game. What is the aerial part?
- The gamepieces are not very common or easy to get; they are also quite expensive.
Back at an FRC Live! I went to, Bill said the GDC keeps a game in backup in case they run into a major problem with the game they were planning to play (ie supply problems). I feel like this is a backup game from circa 2010/2011. They definitely had something more in mind with the truss but cut it for some reason; I assume it was the part that was supposed to be aerial -- maybe a skyhook reverse ascent (descent) from the truss to the ground to start the match.
Changing the game sure would be a game changer, by definition.