[Jared Russell]

There have only been two years I can think of where a COTS mechanism could have given teams a spectacular advantage: minibots in 2011, and can grabbers in 2015.

Every other season, it takes more than one mechanism to play the game at a high level, and integrating various mechanisms into a cohesive robotic system is a huge part of the challenge (that happens to mirror most of real life engineering). COTS components all the way up to subsystem scale can help a team significantly, but honestly, the more substantial the COTS subsystem, the fewer options it gives to elegantly integrate it with everything else.

As a result, there will ALWAYS be an advantage in being able to fabricate specific parts tailored to your overall robot design. You can package things more efficiently, save weight, achieve higher levels of performance, fill in gaps in the COTS offerings, and fit more functionality into a robot that isn't constrained to a set of discrete COTS parts that may or may not place nice together. You not only can do this, you MUST do this (in this era of FRC) if you want to build a truly world class robot. I don't see this changing any time soon.