[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Breadbocks

My understanding of why we have bag day is to make it even for the teams that have to ship their robots halfway around the world to compete. Those teams don't have to worry about getting a practice bot from their local facilities to competition, but they do have to get their competition bot there. So to make it fair, FIRST says everybody has to stop working on what they're bringing to competition and the international teams aren't screwed because they don't live in 'murica or one of the few other countries with regionals.

I'm not sure who told you that. There are some other assumptions made such as practice bot that not all teams have, including ours. We never had one.
As a much younger mentor back in the day when we first got started in 1999, I was told about the FIRST challenge of building a robot in 6 weeks (plus 3 days actually) and it being the hardest fun we ever will experience.
It all changed when withholding allowances were allowed for whatever reasons over the years.
Our program, efforts and setup was created and built over the years based on that premise. We also cant change much because the robot spends all of its time away from home vs the time it was here to create it until mid-May.
Bag/tag made it an extra burden on our program because FIRST provides way less support than they used to because most teams simply drive it to an event.

I understand that many robots and teams get better because they have more time to iterate, especially after a previous event. Quite frankly, I dont know how teams can do it after all the sacrificial time and effort is spent during the official build season. I like Jim's reasoning of the Out of Sight/Out of Mind deal where your mind and body can take a break.

Any changes to Bag/Tag will fundamentally add to the changes of how we view the official Build Season. It'll be interesting to watch it all unfold in the years to come on how they deal with this, if any.
This would further our disadvantages being from Hawaii. But like most teams, we try our best to adjust to whatever changes are made, and hope to still be competitive. Interesting thread though..