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Originally Posted by Ernst
This is a point I'm really stuck on. I hate the design convergence in VEX. I hate that teams, if they're driven enough, can completely scrap their robot between events and copy the most successful design they've found online. My VexU team is about to start our 2nd 9-week Release schedule for a Fall Scrimmage. We'll have another one before our Spring Qualifier. And another one before Champs. We'll have completed 4 separate build seasons. In the process we'll probably lose half of our active members again.
Obviously FRC is more complicated and it would be a lot harder to pull off copying a Week 1 robot that you see for your Week 6 or 7 event. Design convergence with some subsytems definitely currently happens by the end of the season, but those are mostly add-on subsystems, not a defining part of the robot.
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Sometimes I get caught on this too, but as Dean has said time and time again, FIRST is about more than the competition. I would much rather see my students get inspired by a successful design, figure out why it works, make their own, and have it be successful at the next competition, than to have kids leave a competition saying "man, I wish we thought of that." While its true that the above can be accomplished within the confines of Stop Build Day, SBD makes this much harder.
I don't mentor in FRC solely to win competitions (319 didn't do that until 2016). I mentor in FRC because it inspired me to make a career out of robots. There's no denying that a robot that works is more inspiring to the students that built it than a robot that doesn't work. Removing bag day makes inspiration easier to achieve and I'm all for it.