[MechEng83]

To address the original post:

Survey poorly written - yep.
FIRST will make whatever conclusion they want from the data - maybe.

Now, my color commentary: I think a lot of newer folks don't realize the bag and tag is a vestige of the time where we all had to crate up our robots on what used to be termed "Ship Day" and they would sit in some drayage location until whatever competition was next. This was a practice that came about to ensure fairness among teams that might be 5 miles or 500 miles from their competition. With the increasing amount of teams, FIRST decided to test out bag-and-tag and put the onus on teams to get their robot to competitions rather than leaning on FedEx to donate even more free shipping (except for championship, and all the other exceptions listed in the administrative manual). Without crates, bags were put in place to simulate the same locking up.

Some more resource-laden teams figured out that with the robot shipped off, it'd be good to have a 2nd robot to use for testing, practice, and upgrades. Other teams caught on, and then there was the "arms" race.

That being said, I've talked with newer teams that only build one robot, and they are motivated to build a 2nd robot because "all the good teams do that" and they recognize the advantage of still being able to do development after the first robot is made inaccessible.

Is it good that younger teams are striving to be like more established teams by developing business plans to achieve those goals of obtaining more resources? Yes. Could the efforts and resources be better spent not building a 2nd robot? Possibly.

It's a very complex issue, but I did find Cory's post about how bag and tag doesn't really affect how they go about designing/testing very interesting. To his team, bag and tag is a speed bump, not a wall like it is for other teams.