[Jay O'Donnell]

I'll address your second point first. I've seen teams decline for many different reasons. Some teams want the experience of being an alliance captain, some teams want to feel like they're being "strategic" and they overthink what they should do, and I've even seen a team decline what should have been an obvious accept because their representitive saw the 1 seed's last match where they tried high goal shooting for the first time. Most teams decline seeing who's left at that moment, not who will be left to pick when it gets to them.

As for why teams make bad selections, the usual suspect I've found is teams not having scouting or having misleading data. I've seen teams pick based on the fact that a team was consistently average through an event, and not pick teams who started off poor but got better throughout the event.

There's also the simple fact that many teams don't base their picks off of watching matches. I know many teams who pick based off of who they worked well with in a Quals match, or someone who they are friends with. It's also not uncommon for teams who don't know any better to pick the next team down in the rankings, despite them not actually being that good (trust me, I've been the not very good bot picked for that reason before).

Overall scouting is difficult for most teams to pull off effectively due to a lack of students, or just a lack of care by anyone to take data and use it effectively. The best teams have students who genuinely enjoy scouting and the alliance selection process. Personally being a picking team in alliance selections is my favorite part of a robotics competition.