[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

No, teams can continue to work after stop build... but the fact that you have the robot in a bag means that very, very many, if not most, teams take a break after bagging the robot, and the level of work significantly decreases. Take away the bag, and you risk losing that - That's kind of the whole point of my post. Create an incentive for teams to finish their robot early and many will, which will by definition help to decrease the load after that point.

Again, this has not been my experience, and I've not been mentoring teams who have practice bots. The quantity of work does decrease after bag day, but certainly not to the point where it's insignificant, and the biggest result of having the robot in the bag is that the resulting post-bag-day work is extremely inefficient and frustrating for teams that are not sufficiently well-off to have a practice bot to work on.

It seems that your argument is that the extremely regressive effects of the current policy discourage many low-resource teams from pursuing post-bag-day work. This argument seems to me sort of perverse - it is arguing that removing artificial restrictions on low-resource teams (i.e., the pragmatic effect of the current policy) is bad because more teams would then choose to take advantage of the resources they're currently (unfairly) prevented from using efficiently.