Oh lord. Okay, first off, 8 pages ago I suggested you guys take the Great Bag Day Debate to a new thread so we wouldn't be doing this in a random Team Update thread. But no, here we are with a Bag Day Debate titled "Team Update 14". Maybe a mod can split the original 10-ish posts posts to a new Team Update 14 thread and re-title this one.
Second, I don't think the question is whether teams can effectively copy a week 1 robot for a week 6 competition and beat the original. Whether it's feasible or not, any number of teams are going to try it for any number of reason with varying levels of success. I think the more pertinent question on this front is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm putting Allen Gregory down as Good-to-Neutral on this. I'd probably trend the same, though I'd be worried about the long term health of teams that exclusively pursue this strategy. It'd be hard to get students motivated and excited in a program that's fundamentally telling them their ideas are always going to be worse than someone else's.
Someone up thread declared that mentors encouraging the wait-and-copy strategy would be the worst mentors in FIRST. I'd point out that, by definition, FIRST has some of the worst mentors in FIRST in it. This sort of thing is going to happen, and we should decide if the benefits of No-Bag are worth these problems.
In that vein, he's my list of pros and cons to eliminating Bag Day:
Pros:
- No more griping/nit-picking about spares and withholding allowances.
- More time for some low resource teams to work on building/programming.
- More time for rookies to see what a successful design looks like, so they don't show up with a robot that does nothing useful.
- More time for veterans to help some low resource teams. Assuming those teams have a late regional and the veterans aren't too busy.
- Less resources spent on buying/building extra robots. Potentially freeing up resources for other teams and resulting in less stocking issues for Vex, AndyMark, etc.
Cons:
- More time working on robots. My wife gets grumpy enough about the FRC season as it is. Taking away the nominal "break" between bag and competition won't help. I suspect there's a fair number of mentors that feel the same here.
- More time for teams to procrastinate. There's still going to be teams that spend a lot of time doing nothing and end up with not much of a robot.
- Large disincentive for attending early regionals. If you're a one regional team, you're NOT going to want to attend an early event. Most teams in, say, Mexico or Australia this year would have a significantly shorter build season than Texas teams. This change wouldn't bring ALL low resource teams up, just those near late regionals.
- More incentive to wait and copy for late regional teams.
57 is only attending a week 6 event this year, and I would dearly love to have our robot out of the bag and out at Katy testing our withholding scaling mechanism and working on autonomous. I'm just not willing to boldly declare that my current preference for this season is an unalloyed good for the whole program.