[ahartnet]

I'm generally for eliminating stop build day. My only concerns with it is that it does serve as an important milestone for probably several people in FIRST who are involved in capacities beyond mentorship. If we have an unrestricted season or potentially even the 8 hrs of unbag weekly proposed by Jim of the Killer Bees - it'd be harder to peel me away from my team to volunteer for an event. If we're just working with the practice bot and a 30 lb withholding allowance, it seems easier to leave it to the hands of particular subsystems. If it's potentially the whole robot, I'd want to be around. Maybe that's just me and I'm overbearing/controlling.

That said, I think anyone that thinks things would be less stressful for any reason is fooling themselves. Yes, it would enable teams that are capable to help teams that are struggling more (inviting teams without a field to come do driving practice and the like), but as Parkinson's law states, the work fills to the time allowed. Top tier teams are already pushing themselves to the limits and things won't change (much) for them. Teams trying to develop into year in and year out contenders will have better robots, but will be just as stressed. If unrestricted robot access would have let you complete that "1 more thing" this year, all that would happen is you would move on to that next "1 more thing". That's what pulls us into FIRST in the first place. The only place where I see there being objectively less stress is for teams in an area that can get pre-inspected and are willing to do so. I think a major problem is that many of the teams that would benefit largely from being pre-inspected will likely not see or respond to emails setting that time up, or are far away from other teams where getting someone to do a pre-inspection would be tough. Additionally teams far away from a team with the resources to build a field for practice time will still be hindered. How many teams are far enough away from a practice field that they really still won't be prepared for competition?

Even with all the above though, bag day seems to be a detriment your average FRC team.