[PayneTrain]

That is very true, Andrew. Teams on the outside looking in on FiM are acute to the differences between each party.

Even during the economic downturn FiM still had the most valuable resource: great people, and a lot of them. I am obviously partial to looking at FiM through a Virginia-oriented lens, but before the FVC->VRC split that also coincided relatively closely with the great recession and a bunch of other factors, you could draw more parallels between the RCPs that made up Michigan FIRST leadership and those that made up my region. FiM, it can be safely said at this point, had the leadership and foresight (and looming threat of the program's collapse) that no one else had when moving to districts (a system that very smart, dedicated, and competitive people opposed at the time)

Virginia had a climate that lent itself to a great explosion of sustaining VRC teams (which is great!) and unstable and folding FRC teams (which is not great). We also have never and likely never will have a single team of the same caliber of the top dozen Michigan teams for a lot of reasons; unsurprisingly that answer is yet again, people.

It will be interesting to see over the next three years if my region will be able to become the power it has the potential to be or if the status quo will continue to let our car coast down the shoulder while the rest of FRC blows by us.