[Jon Stratis]

I think kickoff is at a good time - I don't want it prior to the end of year holidays - that period is a guaranteed 1-2 weeks off school for students, and the week or two prior to that everyone is checked out (based on my experience growing up). And going before December... We're working with some big, dangerous tools building these robots, and it takes some time to get the rookies comfortable using them safely.

As for allowing materials constructed before build... I am seriously conflicted with that. On the one hand, many teams don't really meet before build, so they would gain nothing - and these are likely some of the teams that need the most help. The high resource teams could save some money doing this, but I don't think it would really change what they could field. Where this would have the biggest impact is the mid-tier teams- those that meet in the fall and/or summer, can build reasonably complex mechanisms, but don't have the organization to get something CAD'd and reproduced quickly during the season.

Personally, I would rather focus on changes that could raise the floor, rather than those that (i think) would raise the middle and leave the floor even worse off.