[Joe Johnson]

What are people afraid of here, really? That we have teams buying their way to a competitive robot? Really? This is the problem with FIRST that keeps you up at night?

Specialized COTS parts enable better robots? Indisputable. That they lesson the FIRST experience for most (or even many) teams? I see no evidence of this.

AND I see the opposite actually.

Specialized COTS parts allow things that are just not possible for the vast majority of teams for pretty much any team that can fund raise a few hundred extra bucks. Is that really that bad of a thing? If I am a lower middle of the road team and I want to have shifting transmissions next year what are my options? I can spend a ton of time and energy trying to design my own (and probably failing) or I can order a tried and true solution from AndyMark or VexPro or others. I just don't see this as a problem.

/begin old man rant/
FIRST has always been one where a team could effectively buy a competitive robot if that was their goal. With enough dough, a team could effectively have a professionally designed and build robot that their kids had almost no input into designing & building.

On the Continuum of Inspiration, I suppose this is too far to one side. Just as I think that letting kids spend 1000's of hours on an arm only to watch it spin in circles all match because FIRST gave them a horrible hack for a drive system (e.g. a drill a trantorque where a chuck should be) is too far to the other.

I seriously doubt that we will ever get to the point where you can order a competitive robot in a kit but we can cross that bridge when we get to it. I still see way too many teams struggling to get a robot to play the game at all to lose any sleep over this dystopian FIRST vision.

Also... ...GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
/end old man rant/

Dr. Joe J.