[Chris is me]

I think the assumption being made by a lot of posters in this thread is that 6 CIM drives are a large competitive advantage. People have stressed this to the point of saying the Kit of Parts is "obsolete" because it has a 4 CIM drive.

While a 6 CIM drive definitely has some benefits, they are not magic. 6 CIMs do not increase your pushing force when you are traction limited. While most single speeds aren't geared to run indefinitely under traction-limited load (pushing against a wall), they are usually geared to be traction limited at SOME point before stall. Thus the pushing force "cap" for robots isn't determined by the number of motors.

Acceleration is trickier, as it's very hard to model several dynamic factors in play to make a general case situation for all robots.

Honestly, I think tons of non-top teams faced extreme defense for the first time this year. Their robots got damaged, they want something easy to blame, so the first guess was more CIMs in opponent drives. The game design sucked and we're scapegoating the motors.