[Nemo]

With more teams headed to Champs, the first, easiest change I'd like to see is an expansion of wildcards.

For every regional event, add exactly six teams to the list who weren't already qualified. That means Hall of Fame teams create automatic wildcards anywhere they go. A team that qualifies via awards and winning at the same competition generates a wildcard. Under this system, it is debatable whether a winning alliance backup robot should get an automatic bid, or if they should instead be #7 on the pecking order. The latter allows for a predictable number of Championship bids to be created.

Here is a possible pecking order for choosing wildcards:
1-6: RCA, EI, RAS, Winners 1-3
7. Winning Alliance Backup Robot?
8. Finalist Alliance Captain
9. Excellence in Engineering Award winner
10. Finalist Alliance 1st pick
11. Quality Award winner
12. Finalist Alliance 2nd pick
13. Industrial Design Award winner
14. Semifinalist Captain from winning bracket
15. Gracious Professionalism award
16. List continues*

*list wouldn't need to be much longer than this for regional events, but it could be longer for district system championship events if they wanted to do anything like that. The points system they use is pretty darned good, though.

This could also kick in if there was no rookie to earn the Rookie All-Star Award. Then the next team on the list qualifies as a wildcard.

I like having the finalist robots and design award robots high on the list since it would tend to send teams with the best robots to the championship.

A system like this would make it seem less impossible to advance from some events. As things are right now, it's incredibly difficult to get into Champs with your robot alone at many (most) regional events if they have two really good teams. In fact, it's even harder if your team has a good enough robot to get picked in the first round. The two good teams pair up and win, and the #16 pick advances along with a rookie team and the two big award winners. Upsets happen, but usually the #1 seed wins those events when two great teams are present.