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Tolerances: Don't design a Jaguar, design a Ford Pickup. You don't want your robot to only work when perfectly tuned and everything is just so. You want it to be able to tolerate as much variation as possible. This variation can come from game elements, field location, or degradation of the robot over the season.

Margin: Don't build to peak performance, always have margin for when things degrade. Electrically, your battery will drop below 12V and this will impact your motors. Pneumatics wise, you may get something in your air flow that restrict it slightly.

Parts that Break: The earlier you find out a part is going to break, the better. This year the programming team was shearing rivets on our intake (we WERE being careful). We got it changed to bolts for the season (drive team is not as gentle as we are). Related item, make sure you know what will break and use this to your advantage. If you have the choice in your design between an easy to replace part breaking or a hard to replace part, ensure the easy to replace part breaks first (sacrificial component) and just build several of them. We had some small pieces of metal used for lifting the portcullis and they broke ~10 times during the season due to impacts with the walls.

Automation: Some designs you can control with PID (or similar). Some designs you can't. If you can have it controlled by software, you'll get more repeatability than by a player. In 2014 we had two different ways of pneumatic catapulting a ball (complaints on pneumatics aside). One pulsed the pneumatics for ~125ms (milliseconds) and the other fired into a hard stop. Both used software and the timing made it so our driver hit one of two buttons based on where he was on the field to score. He couldn't have done these reliably under manual control.