Although I am fully in the "eliminate bag and tag" camp for other reasons, I think the argument that its elimination will improve team sustainability is a bit tenuous. I don't think it will improve struggling teams' robots by an appreciable amount going into their first event, and since I live in a regional area, I don't think it would help out teams at all here because the struggling teams are very unlikely to attend multiple events. The same argument may not hold in district areas, but I won't speak for those.
The one way I am convinced that bag and tag elimination could dramatically improve sustainability would be if every practice bot team committed to something resembling
this. If there were a big petition full of double robot teams that agree to something like this, I think FIRST might seriously consider eliminating bag day.
My best solution to improve sustainability would be to mandate that teams cannot register for an event unless they meet some set of requirements more stringent than "we might have $5000 in a couple of months." A sample set of requirements might be that all rookie teams must:
- Meet with their region's Senior mentor at least twice (remote meetings are fine)
- Submit a 2-year budget to their FIRST Senior mentor which he must approve.
- Get another FRC team to commit to being their "big sister" team for the next 2 years (remote partnerships are fine).
- Have four or fewer individuals on the team who together have at least 4 years of combined FRC, FTC, or VEX experience. These individuals may be either students or mentors.
- Complete a training guide provided by FIRST*. The training guide would take approximately 10 hours to complete, and different sections can be completed by different individuals.
One of the above requirements can be waived by the FIRST Senior mentor depending on surrounding circumstances and provided that the team excels in other areas that are not accounted for in the above requirements.
Adding these requirements will force new teams to acquire knowledge and resources that they might not have otherwise thought to pursue, and if these requirements scare off any teams from forming, they likely wouldn't have lasted long anyway.
*Which would include one of Karthik's strategic design talks