[YAK'ker]

I believe I hear some frustration with how your team is mentor-driven? Do you have strong student leadership who might set up a meeting to talk with the mentors about changing this?

I think if you can set up an avenue ahead of next season where you give more design access to students that will help, but it's imperative that you work on defining what your mentor roles are. Perhaps the mentors need to see more prototyping or at least a decent CAD diagram of students' designs? Ask them what it is going to take for them to give you more creative control, so that students can take more ownership of the projects.

I know FIRST has no strict guidelines for how much control mentors should have over build and design and it would be impossible to enforce this even if they did, so it's up to each team to set those limits. If your mentors won't listen, as a 3rd party to mediate.