[Oblarg]

Just going to offer a bit of perspective from a current mentor, former student. This is not some normative claim about how teams ought to be run, just a couple of observations based on my own experience.

Team 449 is a decidedly student-run team. The robots are designed and manufactured by the students - mentors provide valuable input, but they do not do the hands-on work. That approach was a conscious choice made by our head mentor, and I am exceedingly grateful for it. When I was in high school, I was already a nerd. I did not need "inspiration" in the form of "seeing people do cool things with technology." I knew that cool things could be done with technology. What I needed (and received) were hands-on lessons on how to do things. This is sorely lacking in high-school education (and even in many undergrad programs), and is exceedingly valuable. There is a huge disconnect between knowing some of the theory behind a problem and being able to actually construct a solution. FRC is far-and-away the best program I have encountered for learning how to do the latter. Robotics was probably more valuable to me than the rest of high school put together, all-told.

I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot. Does that mean there is nothing to be gained from that model, or that that is not an appropriate model for any team? No, of course not. But it does mean that there is something lost when you marginalize student involvement. It'd be nice if the atmosphere here were such that people could say this without inciting massive debates, because it's really not (or shouldn't be) a contentious claim. It does not immediately follow from this that "mentor-run teams are bad" or "student-run teams are good" - a team should try to maximize the return for the students, and this is only one factor in that calculation. If you think your team's effectiveness is maximized by an approach that does not emphasize students doing work, that is fine - but there should be no offense taken when someone points out that there are costs involved in that approach.

I understand fully why some teams choose to have mentors do much of the work. On 4464, I do far more work on getting the robot finished than would be permissible for a mentor on 449. They are different teams in different situations, and their needs are not identical. This does not mean that I won't admit that there is valuable experience that the students on 449 receive thanks to their approach that the students on 4464 do not. There is nothing wrong with pointing this out, nor does it reflect badly on anyone. It's just one piece in a much larger puzzle.

Re: the team resources discussion, it is amusing how discussion of this always progress nearly identically to political discussions on socioeconomic disparity. I think it'd be nice to see a bit more understanding of the facts that there are teams with limited resources who are not in that situation simply due to incompetence or lack of motivation, and that teams with more resources are, indeed, at a competitive advantage (in the most general sense - I am not going to argue the specifics of how big this advantage is and how it scales). There is no perfect meritocracy distributing support to FRC teams. This obviously does not justify bitterness towards successful teams - but I think a lot of the vitriol we see when this subject is brought up is as much a result of frustration at the perceived condescension towards disadvantaged teams as of the disparity in resources itself. I don't think I'm the only one who has noticed this.