[mathking]

Rich Kressly, you hit the nail on the head. (As an aside, congrats on 1712's excellent season last year.) For me the central question is how does any change affect the quality and quantity of students who experience the program. If means better robots and better robots means more kids or better experiences for kids, then we should do it. But I don't think that relationship is at all clear.

Siri, here is my perspective on the schedule. Which is based mostly on my experience with my team. I don't buy that there is any significantly large exodus of people from FRC because of the stop build day deadline. A well constructed survey could convince me otherwise, but in particular I don't believe that getting rid of stop build day will cause a lot of students to stay in FRC. I have had over 300 different kids in FRC over the past 15 years and while we haven't had many who quit, none have ever said the schedule being so short made them leave. On the other hand, we have a lot of kids who if the schedule extended build time into the spring would deepen conflicts with other activities. We already have a little over 40% of our students who don't go to our regional competitions because of conflicts with sports, plays or other events. There is no way a change like this would not cause us to lose more of those kids.

And as I said in my previous post, I am not convinced that ending stop build day would in fact produce better robots in the long run.

In spite of this I am fairly ambivalent on the schedule. If they ended stop build day we would adapt, the team would go on. It would personally change some of what I do, and my own schedule (born out of 15 years of this schedule) would mean I wouldn't be as available, but I would adapt too. If they found a middle ground, such as giving every team some number of hours of limited out of bag time, we would adapt. We are still going to strive to provide the best experience we can to the most people we can.