First off, I tend to agree with DR. Joe on this one, but don't expect everyone to agree with me.
However, I think something needs to be changed with respect to "Cheesecaking" (thanks Corsetto for such a horrible word for this activity
), "fix-it crews", etc.
For those of you not paying attention, this has been going on for years. It has manifested itself from fixing broken partners, helping a team pass inspection, and modifying teams to be more compatible for eliminations.
In many cases cheesecaking was stripping off an arm and putting additional weights (anvils, steel plate, bags of bolts, etc.) on a third partner in order to play defense.
This year, increasing a teams functionality with can grabbers was the most popular method of cheescaking. This is directly related to the game design.
Game design can definitely influence the type of modifications teams will make at an event.
To be clear, I am not an advocate of making rules to specifically disallow adding functionality to teams at events, but I am personally against selecting less functionally capable teams because they are better cooking pans for my cheesecake.
This is is a tough subject to address, unless the game just doesn't encourage it. This year's game definitely encouraged it.