[ASmith1675]

The question here, as I see it comes down to the following:

Is it more of advantage to bag your practice bot and have a bunch of spare parts at a competition, or is it a bigger advantage to be able to drive and test with your practice bot?

I think its pretty easy to make the argument that it is a bigger advantage to use a practice bot as a way to allow drivers to practice and programmers to tune in code after bag day. If this was not the case, we would've seen these a lot more of these robots bagged, and used exactly as they were in Palmetto, as assembled spare parts.

A week 0.5 event causes this assumption to be thrown out, as there is no time to either practice or code with the practice bot after bag day, so there is literally NO reason to not throw it in a bag to use as "spare parts". This advantage only comes up because of the inherent disadvantage of participating in a regional so close to bag day.