[RachelOfMars]

I agree that the regional competitions were a mess. But here's one thing we should consider -- and feel free to shoot me if I'm just projecting my own team's problems on everyone else, but I get the feeling it's endemic --:

FIRST is about inspiring students to become engineers. Companies want employees, Dean wants clean water to become universally available, and NASA wants a budget.

It's a leap of logic to instead inspire students to make animations which in turn inspire other students to become engineers. The general reaction to animations is that it's awesome eye-candy -- pretty, but pointless. Partly it's the thirty-second time limit. Partly it's the overally quality of the animations.

Too many animations are just people fooling around with 3DS Max; watch at the regionals, or watch some of previous years' examples. Once you get past the Cybersonics and Metal Jackets, there's a lot of frass in there, the kind that makes a poorly-made robot look sleek. I'm not saying that the teams with those animations are bad; they (we) probably just didn't have enough support.

How many animation teams consist of primarily just one person? Too many.

Inspiring engineering wins awards like Chairman's and so on, but inspiring animators doesn't. Or at least, nobody's tried it. If we put the kind of effort into recruiting new members -- quality members, the honest types willing to spend time and effort towards making an awesome animation -- maybe FIRST will start to notice us.

But maybe it's impossible to do that with a 30 second time limit and a theme like "What does FIRST mean to you?"
I dunno.