[Chris is me]

On the side discussion: looking at a single event in a single year is a terrible way to establish a trend or lack thereof. It's not good data. How about this: Take a sample of teams with different global OPR ranks and compare them to median income of their home city. See what the general trend is. This data won't prove anything about the sturcture of FRC being flawed, but I bet you would get a nice linear fit. Don't pick a single state or region.

On practice bots: Anyone who wants to keep saying or implying that practice bots take minimal extra effort and just require money can go ahead and talk to my team full of exhausted students, teachers, and mentors. The extra budget (I'd guess $2000 more) is nothing compared to literally doubling your entire workload. Anybody who pulls off the feat of doing twice the build work in six weeks has earned it.

Don't get me started on how your team is "incapable" of building a practice robot, and thus you have to stifle anyone who worked their butts off to make one. First of all, you could always build two less capable, simpler robots. You would have a more competitive season than the single "do everything" doohickey you likely have now. Second, what's less inspiring then telling a team of kids "yeah, I know you want to work extra hard to achieve excellence, but we have to hold ourselves back to match other teams effort"?