[BeardyMentor]

The prefabricated parts just makes the competition closer. It clumps up the middle of the pack to where one match can bump you up to 5th or drop you down to 30th. It really increases the drama of the competition and, in my opinion, makes things better. Even with the proliferation of off the shelf assemblies, they are rarely optimized and need some significant effort to make them more than just passable.

Because these prefabricated assemblies need to be optimized to fit your specific strategy it allows the effort to be put into making a great robot instead of just one that moves kind of like how you need it to. In my experience, the students have a better experience and have more to be proud of when they can build a great robot instead of one that simply minimally performs the task. We have used the KOP chassis almost every year it has been available, but it is rarely recognizable as such after modifications to make it suit our specific needs. It is wonderful not having to re engineer everything from scratch when there is a basic starting point to work from.