The reason I personally am not a fan of the 6 week build season is that it gives one the idea that we stop. Been doing this long enough to know that FIRST teams rarely stop at 6 weeks. I am a people leader at my job (it's part of my duty) and if someone on my team with the crazy hours we work took 6 weeks of their time to do this every possible non-work/non-sleep hour and then more and more time outside of that I would ask them to think over the impact this quasi-deadline is having on them.
However there is a learning issue at work here and after a good long time I am making efforts to decouple it. I can't teach a really motivated programmer or CNC machinist (that's right I am treating these young adults as young professionals with a skill) a large amount of what I could teach them in a mere 6 weeks. MORT (FRC11) does MORT-U between September and just before Thanksgiving 2 nights a week. Even that is not enough. It's not merely a MORT thing, or a MAR thing or even an FRC thing. They have the same issue at
NextFAB and that has little to do with FIRST at all. Also that commitment of 6 weeks every night is really hard for me at a personal level considering the scale of my responsibilities (I work in Manhattan and Mount Olive is 2.5 hours each way).
So I am slowly gathering machine tools light enough to be mobile and FRC parts to make it possible to decouple from MORT the programming and CNC efforts. Then, even in the summer when we have limited access, we always have a shop and access to robots. Still on the fence on where we will work but everything is mobile and 115VAC so where ever it is we will make do. Plus this decouples from the charitable corporation and the school so if I decide to help out some other venture with the tools I am free to do so.
If the learning opportunities are not interrupted by demotivating factors I really think the 6 week build season is ample if you have enough people to share the load which does often directly work against new teams. I have rarely seen a new team that came into FIRST with all of the required skills to compete with the veterans, mind you, many learn impressively fast but the playing field is hardly level. It has taken me 20 years to decide to commit what amounts to $15k to building tooling that doesn't actually serve my business purposes (I can do my job and run my businesses with a cheap printer, laptop and Internet). Now I just need to make it finally happen and see how many students commit their time to this opportunity.