[Joseph Smith]

Here's my take on the situation.

An uneven playing field is a fact of life. In FIRST, just like in industry, there are teams that have dozens of big-name sponsors who can afford to build a practice robot, and there are teams who barely have the resources to build ONE robot. And those well-funded teams have worked their butts off to secure the funding and resources, and to keep it every year. Removing bag and tag won't change the fact that bigger, better funded teams will have an advantage. Teams with experienced design mentors and a history of success will be able to make riskier, more outlandish or impractical designs work.

I guess my roundabout conclusion is this: With bag and tag, big high-resource teams will have the best robots, and smaller teams will have worse robots. Without bag and tag, big high-resource teams will still have the best robots, but they will be even better, and the smaller teams will have significantly better robots, but still not at the level of the big teams. Overall, both the ceiling and the floor for robot performance would be raised.