[Caleb Sykes]

I have many concerns about the proposed 2017+ championship format, but one of my biggest ones is the fact that the competitive strength of the championship will almost certainly become appreciably weaker than the district championships. To combat this, I propose the following waitlist policy:
Eliminate championship waitlist spots, and allow waitlist entries into DCMPs

We already have had this drop in competition in previous years, MSC has consistently had more competitive qualification rounds than championship divisional level qualification rounds. It doesn't make any sense to me that the level of competition should drop as teams move up to a higher level of competition.

This year, approximately 200 of the 2900 active FRC teams will be getting in to championships off of the waitlist. This amounts to 7% of teams. If each district region allowed 7% of the teams in their region to qualify for DCMP off of a waitlist, just as many waitlist teams would get to experience a "championship" event as the current system allows.

My ideal implementation would actually be a hybrid implementation with the current point qualification system. For example, allow 90% of the capacity for DCMP to be filled by the highest point-scoring teams as in the current system. However, for the remaining 10%, multiply each team's district points by the number of years since that team has been to championships. The teams that have the highest scores with this new metric also qualify. In this way, teams still have to do reasonably well to attend DCMP, but it will eventually invite every team to the DCMP event.

I did not factor regionals into this discussion since regionals will be largely obsolete in the near future.