[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Dalas

I find it very frustrating when we spend time coming up with the perfect design or cutting the perfect parts, only to find that a team with less engineering experience but more money can buy a kit and defeat us easily.

Why don't you just take the COTS parts into account when designing? If you know what you can buy off the shelf don't you have a solid baseline for what standards you should be performing at? If you know a kit bot runs x ft/s and has y amount of pushing power, shouldn't you design above that? If you know they have an intake that is constrained to work in one way can't you use that against them?