[George Nishimura]

I think no bumpers helped a lot of the inexperienced teams, and it seemed like there was much less of a need to constantly repair/maintain the robot throughout a competition.

It also mostly avoided bringing out a lot of the unpleasantness of last year, including questionable referees calls and large amounts of disagreements over what constitutes the "spirit of the game".

Ranking in qualifications did a better job of reflecting robot performance, although as usual it was not perfect.