I'm proud of myself for reading the whole thread before posting. I'm not sure how much of the thread I actually internalized, but seeing as its growing at levels almost exceeding that of game hint threads, at least I made it through. Those on CD sure do hold their opinions very close.
I am a senior on my team, and have been a member since 2012. My team made it to championships in 2013 on chairmans, and that experience was very transformational for me. It created that thirst to be the best, to put in countless extra hours, especially this year, when I wanted to return. My team didn't make it back, but thats beside the point. I can't pinpoint exactly what about world championships was so inspiring to me, the sea of hormones at roboprom, the intense competition, the people like me, the antics at the hotel. There are things in a championship event that are beyond the competition that probably still would have inspired me, but thats not really my problem with this decision.
What bothers me most about it is that they didn't talk to teams about it beforehand, y'know, before contracts were signed, especially such long contracts. I could see trying it out for a year and seeing if it works out. I understand details still need to be worked out, but huge decisions have been made without any community involvement. Frank has been doing such a great job being transparent with much of FIRST's inner workings, but this seems to have been a major slipup. Its placement right before current champs and during many DCMPs seems an attempt to slip it under the radar. I don't understand FIRST finances, and I understand I can look them up, but whenever I think about it, I can never figure out where the money goes.
There was community support behind the super-regional model posted here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/at...chmentid=18804 and I don't understand why this wasn't at least closer to the truth.
The cities chosen also don't make much sense to me. There was a map posted earlier with 750 mile circles drawn on it, and it looks to be horribly inconvenient for PNW and California, generally much of the west, as well as much of the far east, which is where I thought a majority of the teams were. Neither of these cities is super cheap to fly into, Houston ain't the worst, but detroit is pretty pricey, and only getting worse. Flying is what it appears most east and west coast teams will need to do.
There was an earlier suggestion about a small basketball arena for the true championship, to crown a real winner and a tongue in cheek suggestion about not invitiing chairmans, ei, HoF 2nd, 3rd picks. I think these ideas honestly work well together. Have your big flashy championship events, inspire the kids, and invite the best robots to a one weekend day, true championship. I don't have a good metric for picking "The best robots", but I would hope FIRST could scramble together the money to pay for those best robots(and a skeleton team) to get to ultrachamps. In a perfect world, these super exciting matches would be televised(at least web broadcast with enough bandwidth for everyone who wants to to watch), which would inspire the public, and keep FRC a sport.
On a different note, I can't speak for them, and they're certainly way too busy about now, but I'm really glad I'm not a Michigan volunteer once Detroit hosts a championship.