Creativity is overrated.
One of the things I've learned from seven years of engineering school and five summers of internships is that
engineering is not about creativity. It's about making stuff that works. Don't get me wrong. Creativity is great. I love seeing clever mechanical designs no one else thought of. I enjoy watching teams push the envelope and bring harebrained ideas into the mainstream (e.g, mecanum wheels were almost unheard of in robotics until two FRC teams introduced them in 2005).
But in engineering, if something simple, something obvious, something completely tedious and boring and "been-there-done-that" gets the job done - you should probably use that. Not always. But usually.
Instead, as JVN wrote elegantly,
all of us are copying other ideas. The trick is to refine, combine, and synthesize ideas to create something better. After the 3-day build was over, I remember someone commenting, "Not bad. They got the pace about right, but they stopped 6 weeks too early." As many people in this thread already said, many of the ideas are already in the minds of the experienced mentors and historically astute students - Ri3D helps put them out in the open, and jump-starts the iterative refinement free-for-all.
Second, remember that there are several scales on which this innovation and design happens. One is the robot concept. But generally, that happens during only a few days of build season. The rest of the season requires just as much innovation and design and clever thinking, but you don't see it from the stands.
As someone who's been watching FRC for quite some time, yes, this year has somewhat less visible design variance than past years. However, this has been true in past games as well - look at 2010 (Breakaway), where nearly all robots were little flat rectangles with kickers on the front. But the design variation inside the little boxes was still impressive. If you take the time to look under the hood, you'll notice a surprising amount of variation this year, too.
Finally, despite the cruched schedule, Ri3D/BB is a superb model of the FRC design process. How many teams would benefit from following the strategize/prototype/design/build/iterate process that the Ri3D teams described? We get a peek into how some really great minds think about this process. And we ought to copy that!