Your statement shows that you may be misunderstanding what's the mission of FIRST. It's not to appeal to members of already existing teams. Your attitudes about the attractiveness of STEM are already changed. As I've said many times, FIRST is aiming to reach well beyond your team. It wants to attract students who aren't inherently builders. That's great if that's your motivation, but why stymie the ability to attract others to the program because you have a specific preference? Why should your preference trump everyone else?
And given that preference, I'm don't see why allowing certain teams to focus on competitive excellence as their motivation conflicts with your preference to be motivated by the engineering challenge? Is there an inherent conflict that I'm not seeing?
And if you don't see how expanding FRC helps your program, then we need to have a separate conversation. Remember that your team was started in 2012 because FRC is expanding, so you have been directly impacted by that outreach. And others will benefit in the future as well.
BTW, I am not using personal anecdotes or statements of personal preferences. Please point to any of my posts that allude to my personal motivations for participating in FIRST other than I think this is a fantastic educational program that has the potential to reach a wide swath of the student population. What I have done is relayed what I have learned in my professional experience as an economist which includes an extensive knowledge of the research into the effect of incentives. I also have been a keen observer of sports action and management for even longer. I have tried to avoid any references to my own personal preferences. (It's something that I've developed in my professional work. In one week a few years ago I was called both a "Gringrich Republican" and a "commie pinko." Quite an accomplishment!
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And most importantly I am NOT making sweeping generalizations that "
most everyone is motivated by winning and whatever else." I am saying that many students and mentors are motivated by competition, and based on the postings here and elsewhere on CD, the teams that are referenced as being inspirational (see my passage above) are motivated in a large part by competition. And what those teams do on and off the field is inspirational to other teams, even those not motivated by competition. (And I do have the empirical evidence that almost everyone is motivated by incentives. That premise is the basis of almost all economic research. I'd be interested to know if you have contrary research. Winning competitions is one type of incentive.)
Finally, I respond to your posts because we are having a public debate about the fundamental mission of FIRST and I believe that your opinions are representative of a much larger group than just you. I don't view you as an isolated voice--you're expressing concerns and viewpoints that others have stated elsewhere and probably by many others who haven't said anything. So, yes I will challenge your statements and the sources of your statements because they carry weight.