I had no idea that so many folks treated scouters like this... Wow.
We do pit scouting for different reasons, depending on the game. This year, we are going to want to know what sort of defenses they "think" they can cross -early in the competition, we will not have much information on this at all. Our scouters will look at wheels and drivetrains... Etc.... When we have seen a robot at a different competition, we'll ask them about upgrades... If the robot struggled with something either a previous week or earlier in the weekend, we'll ask how they are doing with fixing the issue.. We like to get a feel for the personality of a team - we we enjoy working with them in eliminations?
More importantly, however, we often send our younger kids out to pit scout so they can interact with other folks in FIRST, experience Gracious Professionalism, and see how other teams operate - both with robot construction but personal interactions. Commonly, we'll send more introverted students around in pairs as it provides moral support and helps them to learn to engage and interact better with others.
I don't judge what other scouts ask us. Just as we send scouters out for lots of different reasons, we assume other teams do as well. We also recognize that often the information pit scouts bring back is completely secondary to the experience they are getting....
Reading some of the comments above, I understand why some of my kids at Champs last year decided they didn't want to pit scout any more.
