FIRST design convergence will never, ever, in any circumstance, exist to the same extent that it does in VEX, for a few reasons:
- Vex uses standard hardware all around, making robots look similar and facilitating bolt for bolt copies.
- The Vex season is almost year round, allowing more time for copies and iteration.
- It takes far less time and far fewer resources to build a Vex robot than it does to build an FRC robot
- While Vex allows for some design flexibility, the COTS centric nature limits the number of highly successful and visible design variations to copy. Meanwhile, if you asked FRC teams everywhere which robot they should copy, I think you would get a lot of different answers.
This isn't to say design convergence isn't a cause for concern or anything, just that everyone's "nightmare scenario" of completely identical robots just won't happen. If it would happen, then we would see hundreds of Ri3D clones, right? Even in the peak year for clones, at worst we would see teams copy the concept with their own spin on it for the most part, with just a few bolt for bolt copies.
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The other criticism of ending stop build I want to address is deadlines. Some have argued a hard deadline is good practice for the real world, so we need bag day to simulate that. The main problem with this logic is that, it's just completely backwards. Bag day is a soft deadline! You get to keep working on the withholding allowance. Even with no withholding, you get to use a practice robot, and plan for COTS upgrades at competition. A deadline of the actual competition day with a no-bag system would be an Actual Hard Deadline. Similarly, having everyone stop at the same time would also still happen at competitions. Everyone at the competition would have just as much time to work on the robots as everyone else at the competition!
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I do recognize there are plenty of arguments to keep the bag, and I don't think they are all invalid. But I think once we get over our fear of change, it would do more good than harm to get rid of it. I'll post more thoughts at a later time.