There are three things you do not bring up on a date: Religion, Politics, Exes.
There are now three thing you do not bring up on a date with an FRC member: Mentor vs Student Build, How drive teams are selected, and Ri3D opinions.
The first two have been around awhile and have merit to be debated but sometimes I feel that the last one makes for some interesting gripes that I shall highlight:
Teams just copy their idea instead of designing their own:
If you are upset about this why not go to those teams, who are most likely less fortunate then yours, and offer them use of your facilities, mentors, or even to sit in on your strategy sessions. I think most teams who just straight copy a design (whether Ri3D or a previous robot from a similar game) have less resources, thus they can't spend as much time developing a design or strategy as they need a lot of time to actually build the machine.
It makes for less inspired students:
I feel this one is a double edged sword, I know most of the original Ri3D crew since I am from Florida, and they are nearly all alumni how cool is that to students to know that these people went from having to pour blood, sweat and tears for 6 weeks can now build a similar product in 3 days? It shows that you can become a skilled engineer at a young age to many students who only have mentors 20 years older then them.
Now the bad part is that in terms of inspiring for the here and now I can see where people come from, thinking up a weird unique idea then seeing it work is one of the most inspiring things when on an engineering project and these builds can prevent said ideas from happening, on the other hand when you are a low resource team like described above you may not have the ability to pull of said design and it may prevent you from thinking about something unique even if you have the resources to pull it off down the line.
It wasn't that bad with only one group but now there are too many
This one mostly comes from the idea that it is limiting the number of unique robots that are at a competition, thus making it less exciting. I can honestly say if you took a black and white picture of every robot in Florida, with no numbers or logos, I could tell you which team it came from with about a 90% accuracy. The more of these that people "copy" the more unique robots appear, due to combining aspects of each one. I feel like down the line if we still only had the original crew, that this would be a problem since designs would be severely limited in a challenging game. (As an aside there is still only 1 game where i felt more then half the field looked the same and that was 2010)
It is not allowing teams to fail
This is one that is not said to much publicly but I have had it discussed with me in private. You can learn a lot from failure, it teaches you more then victory. I feel people who make this argument are what people describe as middle of the road teams, teams who are consistently good enough to be in eliminations but are rarely the alliance captain, the reason for this complaint is it makes the middle of the pack bigger thus teams are more likely to miss eliminations due to a plethora of similar teams. That being said I both agree and disagree with the first reasoning for wanting teams to fail. Yes it allows for growth when you are almost embarrassed to see your robot on the field and never want to be in that position again, but for the other members of your alliance, as it has been said time and time again, I would rather have a Ri3D clone then someone who doesn't function on an alliance.
These are just the arguments I remember off the top of my head, if more of them come out the wood works I will respond further
