Reiterating what Todd and Eric said, it really seems like you're wanting to cherry pick things that worked for other teams. Looking at the successful designs is great, but what do you gain in the long term from building a good, robust robot for THIS game?
It's a very important question, because as Todd said, you have the opportunity to simulate an in-season design process that your team can use to hone your strategic analysis skills, prototyping, and robot development. It's an opportunity many teams would love to have, and I really hope your team doesn't squander the opportunity.
Todd and Eric both hit on this, but it really needs to be emphasized.
Spend as much time as you can analyzing the game and potential strategies to play it. This is one of the major differentiating factors between top tier teams and everyone else. Time is THE biggest luxury you have in the off-season, and practice now will really help your team when the 6-week build season kicks off next January.
I know, Strategic analysis can be dry, boring, and tedious. It's extremely easy to skip critical pieces of the game unless the entire team buys into it.
This can be the unfortunate result when you don't spend enough time on strategy/game analysis. An incoherent strategy is what killed us at the first event, because we didn't develop a clear game strategy to meet our design goal of 2 capped six stacks a match. We 'winged' it, building an elevator on a drive-base and hoping we would be able to play the game.
Please try and avoid that pit that we fell into. Spend the time early, so you don't waste the next 10 weeks building and then redesigning a robot to be competitive.