[Chris is me]

This might have been the most elegantly designed robot in New England this year. I think this is the robot a lot of top teams (mine included) should have tried to build this year. Great job, and beautiful design and machining!

As for the technical discussion on plate thicknesses - 1/4" plate driven design is certainly a viable method for building robots, but it presents some advantages and disadvantages versus both tube and bent sheet metal based designs. They are essentially the three main design paradigms in FRC robot design, and whether or not one is better than the other is dependent on your resources.

The big advantages of 1/4" plate based designs are in design flexibility (you can basically put any feature anywhere you want and just design the plates to support it, it's kind of cool) and some perks in construction and assembly (tapped holes, better bearing fits, etc). The big downsides are in having to remove more material to match the weight of other design styles and requiring a higher part count (standoffs, etc) to get comparable rigidity.

If you have a team with good lathework (for standoffs and the like) and more "2-D" manufacturing resources like a waterjet or laser where cutting times for intricate patterns are still fairly quick (and cutting tube isn't ideal), 1/4" plate designs play well into those resources. If you can add precision bending to that playbook, you can use thinner plate + flanges to save some lightening and effort, but not every team has these resources. A lot of it is also designer preference and expertise.