[AdamStockton]

I think that the one strategic component that sparked Karthik's concerning response to this poll is the "trade-off".

A team's strategy that involves going under the low bar places a significant design and size constraint on the team's robot. The team essentially needs to design and build a robot that is ~15" tall or less in order to meet their objective of going under the low bar. This is a significant challenge, even for some of the best teams in FRC.

Most teams will end up making significant trade-offs and compromises when it comes to their robots functionality in order to accomplish their goal of going under the low bar. Where some of those teams could have had an excellent shooter, climber, or other defense manipulator(s), they might have had to reduce the effectiveness or eliminated the capability in order to go for the low bar.

A robot that can breach the outer works by itself (regardless of what defenses are on the field) would require the capability of crossing maximum of 8 different defenses. Being able to go under the low bar only reduces that requirement to 7 defenses (including the low bar).

I think that Karthik is terrified that most teams that choose to go under the low bar will have made so many design trade-offs that they won't be able to do much of anything else on the field. A team might have been better off with a robot that can shoot and/or climb rather than one that can only go under the low bar.

Teams that are designing for the low bar might actually end up lowering the bar for themselves in the process.