[Oblarg]

Often (especially in FRC) we have complicated systems that you can mock up really easily, for which it is far easier to tune a prototype than it is to work it out the behavior theoretically. There is also the fact that FRC is a high-school competition, and tuning a prototype is something most high school students can do and understand a lot better than a lot of the math required to correctly model many of the things we deal with in FRC (for example, how many high school students are realistically going to understand continuum mechanics?).

Take, for example, the frisbee shooters in 2013. Those were complicated nonlinear systems that would be a nightmare to model. I don't know a single team that did any sort of theoretical modeling of the effects disk compression or motor speed or rail friction on the reliability of such a shooter. I don't know why anyone would even consider approaching the problem that way, when all of those things can be figured out empirically with a simple prototype. I don't think this is sloppy, nor do I think it builds bad habits.