[LeelandS]

As with every year, there is no way to determine a "best" design. Hundreds of teams with the same style of design will have hundreds of different results. It's all about implementation of the design and how well it works with the rest of the features on the robot.

For example, 1405 used the traditional roller-bar intake. It's probably the most common one for this game, so how can it be any better or worse than any other? We iterated several variables in the design over the 6 week build season, as well as post-bag with a practice bot, until we found what we believed to optimize the intake. Coupling the design we set on to work best with out mecanum drive base, our intake fit our robot very well and was easily the best feature of our robot. It was at least good enough that Team 20 awarded us with the "Black Hole Award" for "A Collector that Game Pieces Gravitate Towards." Was it the best intake at FLR? Eh. But I'm, personally, very proud of it.

If you try and rank designs from "worst" to "best" you'll always find anomalies, such as a powerhouse team using a design you thought was "worst" and dominating regionals, or lower-tier teams using the "best" design and being unable to intake a ball their entire competition.

Throughout the season, I've seen amazing claw intakes, roller intakes, "toro's" and grabbers, and I've seen useless claw intakes, roller intakes, toro's and grabbers. It's less about the design, more about the process.