Traditional style defense:
- Gives robots with less effective (dare I say "failed"?) scoring mechanisms a way to contribute to their alliance.
- Lets teams reuse large chunks of successful engineering design from year to year. What's effective for pushing, pinning, and blocking one year tends to be transferable to next year's robot with minimal rework.
The first has value as a force for parity, maybe keeping some young teams from getting discouraged. But once past their rookie season most of the students have caught on that hearing "you play defense" during alliance match planning isn't usually a good thing.
The second has value too, rewarding the building of team competencies over the years, but that's traded off against parity.
My hope is when defense returns, as it certainly will, the GDC consider that ice hockey style contact defense is not the only kind there is. Billiards, shuffleboard, and even chess, for example, have defense, but with minimal pushing, shoving, and hitting. Defense does not have to mean the same problem and the same solutions year after year.