I just finished the Sacramento regional, and have to say that it was on par with what you are saying. At first I thought that the TV sitting in the pit area was due to the fact that Sacramento was a rookie regional. However, to continue the tale of woe, autodesk Forgot,
FORGOT! I tell you to put our animation on the tape.
When I talked to the autodesk representative their response was roughly along ithe lines of "Oops." I was very upset. Although our team had very little chance of winning (as I had never used the software before, and spent five weeks learning how), I was really upset by all of my work being wasted. Moreover, what is with teams not in the regional being able to win???
Our regionals competition was won by Gunn robotics (team 192), who had a truely remarkable movie, by the way, but they didn't come to our regional. At this point i am seriously considering whether or not to enter a movie next year. At least I can hope that the Silicon Valley regional will be better.