[EricH]

My take on some of this:

If the ALLIANCE agrees on a strategy, and nothing happens to disrupt the strategy, then the TEAMS on the alliance need to stick to the strategy. Of course, if something happens to disrupt the strategy, all bets are off.

In my opinion, any alliance partner who cannot stick to the alliance strategy and doesn't have a good explanation (such as heavy defense altering the strategy, or a broken robot--showing off is not a good explanation if it wasn't brought up in the strategy meeting) should be off of the other alliance partners' picklists, on the spot. Ditto for any team that just can't work well with their alliance partners' drive teams. Again, that's only my opinion; the scouts on my team probably have a different one, and I won't even try to get into what scouts/strategists on other teams think, because there's no way of knowing.