[Steven Smith]

Agree with all above on fence sitting.

We were a Ri3D "copycat" last year (technically BuildBlitz). We had a near 100% rookie team of students/mentors who had no concept of how to solve the challenge, build a robot, or even identify basic tools. Forcing a student led design would have likely resulted in us not completing a robot on time or it not being executed well.

We ended up with a respectable (though not super consistent) robot that performed well enough to get our team excited. Now we have a crop of returning students that are able to communicate some design ideas, better iterate on robots, and have more potential to make design contributions this year.

So... I believe we are proof that Ri3D does have a place in the "inspiration" category. I still believe it is both more inspirational and educational for a team that knows almost nothing to "copy" a competitive design and tweak it to fix all the issues that arise from poor execution, than for the team to build something completely original that is inherently flawed. Once a team starts to build team IP and original ideas, Ri3D should become less useful.

However, the number I saw thrown out there recently about ~10% of the team submitting FIRST choice orders on time reminds me that we on Chief Delphi are the minority. We still have a large number of teams out there that lack the mentorship to execute original and competitive designs on their own... and building a Ri3D bot is probably better than building a kitbot drive base with a non-functional mechanism.