[Arpan]

From the perspective of a mentor for a team that has attended Champs once in our seven year history( back when I was a student):

Yes, the FRC World champs are a wonderfully inspiring thing for teams who attend - It is incredible to be able to play with 2056 in one match and try to stop 67's full court shooter in the next. Yes, it would be wonderful if more teams could attend, and yes, it is terribly expensive for teams on the coasts to travel to champs as-is.

However, splitting Champs into two drives FRC away from it's 'varsity sport for the mind' model and risks losing much of what drives at least my team.

My team's students are - and always have been- driven to be the very best.
Teenagers are competitive people. They don't want just want to play- they want to win. The drive to win is what pushes my team and my students to keep learning and improving, year after year after year.We find the best - teams like 254 or 1114 - and try as hard as we can to emulate them.

That's something you don't see in Science Olympiad or Debate team or any other "academic sport". It's unique to FIRST.

The reason that finals in St. Louis have the energy that they do is that, after all our weeks of work, we're finally going to see who the best of the best are.

Splitting champs will probably not impact anything quantifiable. The scores at the top across events might be similar. To a volunteer that visits Houston and Detroit, the events might even seem the same.

However, the opportunity to find out who's robot really is the best in the world and recognize them as champions will be gone and will take one of the most important intangibles that drives teams to succeed with it.