I enjoyed reading through this thread. It shows what a lot of people think about during competition and throughout the season. A lot more then actually talking about swerve lol.
Where I think most of the discussion is coming from is a difference in what teams are trying to accomplish during the season. Everyone is trying there best to accomplish what they feel is the best goal. That's the wonder of FIRST. There are many goals to shoot for.
Take for example, My Senior year on 1565. I was team captain on a team that had never produced a good quality robot (Competitive or Engineering wise). Our team was small and had little machining capabilities. I decided to spend all summer prototyping a drive train that FIRST has never seen before. The game happened to work very well for this type of system so we built it that year to compete.
Here is the drivetrain:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...806#post706806
The main objective of this drive train was not, however, to win an event. It was built entirely to "put our team in the spotlight" so to speak. To generate buzz and interest in the community of FIRST as well as in our own community.
The robot did exactly what I wanted it to. We won some awards for it as a bonus and got a lot of attention at the events we attended as well as here on Delphi. But the biggest thing that happened was tripling our team from having about 10 people to have around 30.
So, Long story short, Some teams build robots to win a regional, some build to win a championship, and some build to generate interest in science, as well as many other reasons.
Swerve can be built to fit any of those goals, or built to fit none of them. Its really the choice of the team that wants to build it.