I strongly support Ri3D, and am very glad that they are doing it again this year with more teams.
I think that creativity takes many forms, and I strongly believe that just as much creativity can come out of looking at an existing solution and adapting it as much as coming up with an idea "from scratch," though I do believe that most creativity in FRC stems from adapting an existing object or mechanical device concept used in the wider world into an FRC application (buckets in 2013, etc). There is an awful lot more time put into "detail the concept and executing" in FRC, which are heavily pushed toward success/failure by the initial design decision.
Ri3D provides teams with several tested solutions. Teams are able to prototype and build their own solutions, but they know there is a tested solution to fall back to if needed even at the end of week 1.
Having had multiples of both struggling and successful years, there is a lot more learning that happens with the students on tweaking and improving a machine that works than struggling to make a machine work at all.
Robots that at their core use Ri3D concepts to speed prototyping and overall layout design can still develop original mechanisms that win
creativity awards.