[efoote868]

Originally Posted by fresh_prince

If the man-hours given to development are already a matter of self-regulation and evaluation of a team's own response to that "competitive pressure," and if each team already responds in a different degree, there's no reason to expect that to change if we #BanTheBag.

Parkinson's law says otherwise, "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". If my team has an 8 week build season, we will use all 8 weeks of it. Furthermore, I speculate that we would require the entire team to participate for all 8 weeks, which would prevent students with other activities from joining the team.

The stop build day is the end of our build season. If the stop build day was removed, we would probably spend that extra 2 weeks prototyping, so that the final assembly gets done the night before competition, or early in the morning that very day.

Originally Posted by fresh_prince

Teams will continue to respond to the same competitive pressure, albeit with a barrier removed that improves convenience. A team that already wasn't driven to bring in a new subsystem or some spare parts under withholding probably won't be that much more likely to actually go through with those plans under a Bag-Free regime, it just makes it easier for the teams that already wanted to but found it difficult to do so (lack of resources to test on practice robot, difficulty in preparing modifications for a robot you can't test them on, etc.).

In my humble opinion, the pressures (and relief!) a team faces isn't the same without a stop build day, which is why I want to keep it.