[Chris is me]

I'll miss the full robots, but I'm glad Vex is doing what it is doing. It is quite honestly a huge service for the entire FRC community - both struggling teams and the better-off teams who play with them.

While we all love to talk about how events like these kill creativity or hand teams a solution, they really aren't. What it is doing is killing the "creativity" of a team who only had the resources to test one idea and run with it regardless of effectiveness. Quite frankly I would rather these teams be able to play the game at all than "creatively" struggle to complete even the most basic tasks. Clearly those teams making the copies would too.

I don't think a lot of teams who are "well off" realize how huge of a burden prototyping can be on a young, understaffed team. Over the past half decade 2791 has been working more and more each year toward strong, varied prototyping in build season, and it's way harder than it looks. In the absence of well trained students, you essentially need a mentor per prototyping group to really keep everyone focused and ask the right questions needed for the students to push the prototype further. Until this year, perhaps last, we did not have the resources to prototype more than one mechanism at a time.

2791 has enjoyed some relative success in the past few seasons. I don't think it's unfair to say that we are a competitive team at the regional level. But we owe so much of that success to sharing design concepts, learning how other teams' prototypes worked, and some straight up copying of a prototype or two. Our 2014 shooter, 2013 shooter, 2012 hopper, these are all mechanisms that we were only able to pursue with exposure to others' prototypes and having the privilege of being able to choose what to prototype based on those ideas.

The only reason we were able to take our limited prototyping resources and apply them in such a focused way toward a proven good concept? We network with several teams throughout the build season to exchange this kind of information. This is not a benefit that every team has. What Vex Build Blitz and Ri3D do is give every team in FRC access to some viable concepts to start from. I think for hundreds of teams this resource is invaluable.