Some things I've noticed is that sometimes defense damage is called late, although that's expected to some degree since it's called manually (afaik). (This can sometimes waste precious time)
Visibility is very poor, although the defenses do play a role in it the plastic/glass that drivers must see through makes it much more difficult as it's difficult to see through and very smudged and scratched up.
Apparently our team (and a couple others) were having connectivity issues because safety blocks in default lab view code are getting info "too slowly" from FMS (as far as I understand it) causing the roborio/radio to restart(?).
Tech also had us (and other teams) place the Ethernet port on the radio in the socket nearest to the power adapter port. However after connectivity issues our team (and a couple others) switched it just to see what happens back to the regular port (further from the power port). Didn't see any issues after that from radio
Ramming the driver stations is really a BIG issue, especially for teams that have large setups. Ours remained unaffected even when slammed against directly since it's just a laptop thrown on there, but other teams with "raised" stations had theirs fall off often, often causing them to lose the match, connection, or sometimes entire laptops.
Cloth was removed from lowbar as expected (as others have pointed out)
Announcing (at least at waterford) was spectacular, although would like to see more involvement and care taken with the stream (and auto archiving on twitch turned on guys!!!).
Bandwidth for the school was a bit of an issue, and power cords/cabling even more so.
The drawbridge is REALLY floppy. Not at all like expected, turns into one big bump and may actually flick your robot right off if it's light (ours is <60 pounds!!)
Human players bowling across the field seems to be okay.
It seems at the start no teams had auton working with any of the defenses. Nearing the latter half of day 1 a lot of the bigger teams had it working to some degree and almost all teams had proper auton (cept ours of course) even in qualifiers in day 2.
It also seems scrimmages/something must have gotten some times misinformation about the dimensions of some of the defenses. I remember the ramparts perhaps being a bit wider or the opposing side having a little less height.
Field durability repair (at Waterford at least) definitely improved at an increasing rate.
There were a couple of issues with people using hotspots, although i'm not going to pretend I know if that does/doesn't affect connectivity.
Don't know how I feel about the bagging rules. It's got it's fair share of positives and negatives, even for a super small rookie team.
Penalties (as the driver) were hard to notice, although that might just be an issue localized to us.
Other than that I didn't really observe any negatives. Everyone was polite and super helpful people, tons of jamming out to the music by just everyone (even refs, THANK you to whoever did the playlist at Waterford haha), judges were extremely professional, nice, and listened to anything we had to say. Volunteers and all staff was great (even if their job meant I had to be hindered by goggles!!!!).
Overall for the first competition ever attended by our team it was certainly an amazing experience, mixing just the right amount of professionalism and understanding good-will. We learned a ton, broke a ton more, and most importantly met some of the best people ever. Thanks week 1!
(sorry for any repeating ideas that mighta been mentioned before!!!!)