[Orthofort]

I've watched the drama unfold today and have been afraid to post since my opinion doesn't seem to lie with the majority, but here goes:

I understand the extreme disappointment that comes from the lack of a singular winning alliance, or a singular winning CCA, and I won't fight that point in particular.

However I do think we need to take a step back and view FIRST as a whole, or even just FRC as a whole. The portion of obsessed people that frequent CD only represents a small part of the people involved with the program. There are many, many people who dedicate their lives come build season, but only to their team, they don't necessarily follow FRC as a whole and keep up with all the top teams. Many of these people probably couldn't even name last year's winners.

I know many of the people on my team in particular only have even heard of 254 or 1114 if I've showed them videos, raved about their robots to them, etc. They simply aren't in our region, and they only see FRC at the competitions we go to, they don't spend nights on CD or watch other streams, but their just as dedicated to FRC and our team as anyone else is.

These people form a vast majority of the population of FIRST, heck I'd bet the majority of people in FIRST haven't even heard of CD. These people in general would be incredibly excited at this news. I know that once people on my team found out the news today they were ecstatic, because to be honest, they don't care whether champs crowns a single victor, they just love the extra opportunities to compete with a higher level of play.

Now this isn't to discredit the people on those teams like 254 and 1114, who reasonably are angry at this. I know if I were on one of those elite teams, my reaction probably would have been very different. And a significant part of the FRC-obsessed piece of me is extremely disappointed that this was FIRST's solution to the problem.

In no way was this the best solution to the problem in my opinion, I think expanding the 3-tiered system of districts -> regionals -> champs would have been the best solution, and I personally am frustrated with their secrecy before dumping this out of nowhere.

However, we have to understand that this does appeal to the larger majority of FIRST that isn't necessarily represented here on CD.