[Jon Stratis]

Personally, I'm rather swayed by the international team argument - if we remove bag day, it automatically puts those teams at a disadvantage, as they have to be hands off the competition robot while it ships. Having had teams from Hawaii or China at my events before, I don't want to see them decide to just to local events so they have that extra week or two to work on the robot. We'd miss having them and the different experiences they bring to the event!

Also, having the 6 week deadline directly amirrors how things go for me at work as a software engineer. You spend a lot of time working on a release, with a known target date. You meet that date and package up your "dot-zero" release. Then you turn around and start working on the "dot-one" release, fixing everything you didn't have time to fix within your schedule, or addressing bugs that were found late in the process. There's a lead time between finishing the release and going live, and as a result your under time pressure to finish the "dot-one" release so you go live with that instead of the "dot-zero". Then it goes live and your customers find all sorts of stuff you missed. So you go back and start working on fixing those in a "dot-two" release, again under a time crunch because you don't want to tick off your customers for too long.

In FRC, your bagged robot is version 1.0. You keep working on improvements, and practice day at the event you change it to 1.1. Then you see how it does on the field, design other improvements, and address those for version 1.2 at your next event. Take away stop-build, and your short changing that cycle, in my opinion.