[Jared Russell]

I just want to point out (again, as is annual tradition) that those who go "tools down" on "stop build day" are already making a choice. Don't pretend that you're not.

The only barriers to continuing to iterate on your robot legally are (a) the expense and extra work of building a practice robot (a few thousand dollars and many person-hours, which is significant), (b) fitting your post-bag modifications into your withholding allowance (which IMO has not been a problematic constraint in recent years), and (c) the feasibility of transporting your modifications to your next event (which is an issue, albeit a big one, for a small number of teams like my international and Hawaiian friends).

What tenable arguments could there possibly be for keeping the stop build day?

Fairness? Totally out the window. In fact, there are artificial obstacles to continuing to work that make it harder for a low-budget, low-hour team to keep up.

Preventing duplication of successful designs? (a) Copying happens to some extent already, but (b) it will never happen to the same extent as in Vex and FTC because it is much more difficult and nuanced to copy and perfect something in FRC. Moreover, I think that games that converge to a single optimal solution are fundamentally not very good games.

Saving us from ourselves? I sympathize with this and know all-too-well about burnout, but still don't think it's a convincing argument. Again, you are already making a choice and are more than welcome to continue to do so if build season rules are relaxed. For every "in the real world there are hard deadlines" point, there is a "in the real world, nobody keeps you from working yourself to death" counterpoint. I work at one of the most competitive companies in the world, and see at least as much value in the latter lesson as in the former.

Preventing escalation of the competitive arms race? This is already present to some extent, but every single year there are tons of examples of teams that succeed despite a disciplined approach to build hours. Look at 67 in any year - they are the prototypical example that proves that a team doesn't need to spend 80 hours per week in their lab to build a world-class robot. I actually think that removing the stop build day would remove barriers to competition rather than add to them.