[Theseusgoats]

To be completely honest, I have never understood this separation between the robot and other aspects of FIRST. They are all intertwined into reaching for the same goal, which is to inspire students into STEM. That is the primary and honestly the only goal of FIRST. As a former student, for me personally, FIRST was in fact about the robot. I only thought about how to build the robot, rather than anything. That has given me lots of technical background and hands on experience. This is invaluable. Yet, I did learn other things, ie how to work with other people. However, the robot is the main way that these things are done. Furthermore, many people only seem to see the negative aspects of competitions. However, I believe that strong competition is the only way to learn.
Say if you are the smartest or most athletic or just overall best student in your school, and for some reason the best student, from some arbitrary metric, is "successful" in whatever terms you may want to have. Then what motivation would you have for trying any harder in school. There is absolutely no reason to try harder. However, if there is competition, you yourself work harder, and in the process learn much more.
Hence, the aspect of competition is critical for FIRST. Without competition or the general spirit of competition, a student will not learn, either the technical points of the robot, or even how to work with others. There is almost no way to learn if there is no final goal at the end. The primary goal for a FIRST team should be to build a good competitive robot. However, one must realize that when building a good competitive robot, many other invaluable skills are gained, without which a student cannot function in the modern world.

PS: I feel like this post is almost definitely going to be taken the wrong way. Please prove me wrong CD.