[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Now back to the modern day, what I can't figure out, is you can essentially buy a very competitive robot, with the right combination of parts, but a very large percentage of teams still produce very poor robots, many of which are incapable of assisting their alliance or scoring any points at all. What gives?

Spend some time around a rookie team with no money or mentors, and it will cease to be a mystery. Honestly, I think a lot of people here would do well to expand their horizons in that way - at best, the "I can't understand how people can do badly at FIRST" culture is unproductive, and at worst it serves to drive people away from this community who stand to benefit from it most.

Moreover, you can't buy entire manipulators, you can't buy any of it pre-assembled, you can't buy the knowledge to make the whole system work; there's always going to be some amount of design and machining involved, no matter how COTS-oriented your design process is. Step back for a second and think about the amount of institutionalized knowledge that goes into putting a working robot on a FRC field; imagine stripping all that away, and starting from scratch. The reality for many FRC teams is that they have a collection of students who have never done any engineering, teachers who have never built robots, and no clear idea of what they're getting into. They often also have extremely limited budgets, and likely could not afford a completely COTS robot (have you looked at VexPro's prices?) even if they had the know-how to put one together. Does it seem so mysterious now?