Everyone is getting upset on behalf of the "elite" teams. Are you all forgetting they'll have the time too? What makes you think they won't utilize it to the fullest. If I know Karthik (I don't really, I just like to pretend I do since we met last year
), he's probably already got a strategy for if bag and tag goes away. Something with multiple configurations of robots designed to scale up through the weeks of competition or align to what's needed.
I know for sure that last year, had there been no bag and tag, 900 would have walked into champs with something closer to the robot we left with. We called it day 2 into build season that the robot needed for regionals wasn't the same one that could get you into Einstein. Why not let teams build different bots/mechanisms/configurations and be able to switch to see what works best? Think of the batman-robin robot last year, how cool if at different competitions they could have used different portions of that robot!