The main point of this thread's original post seems pretty inane, to me.
First of all, you seem to be promoting, if I am not mistaken, a course of action that would reduce the impact engineers would have on their teams. This would, I believe, most definitely adversely affect the inspirational capabilities of any professional engineers in a mentoring role. If engineers on teams only took the roles you'd prefer them to take, do you think that the Technokats would have built their famous ball-drive system? The whole concept was, if I am not mistaken, thought up by Mark Koors, an engineer at Delphi Automotive, and he spearheaded the effort to build it. However strange, and impractical the system may be, I can hardly even think that you would call it uninspirational, and even uneducational.
Anyway, just because
your team can produce a working robot with relatively little outside engineering help, how can you assume that FIRST should change its methods, and become something completely different from what we have watched it slowly evolve into?
The program's goal is to inspire kids, with a high focus on science and technology, as you have already stated. The point is not, however, to have a team produce a fully functional robot with as little outside assistance as possible, and, in fact, that's exactly what FIRST would (again, if I am not mistaken) like to avoid.
As for the team who you use as an example of what you think should not happen, while I agree that it's unfortunate that they didn't know exactly what you asked for, it never seemed to occur to you that the sub-team who works with the robot on the field, including the drivers and human player, might not actually know what the specific gear ratio that they were using. I would give you a little more credit if you were to go into their pit and find every student sitting in the stands, and ask them all the same question about the robot, and they all gave you blank stares, while an adult mentor spouted off the answer, and sent the kids to fetch him another latté. But even then, that's an infinitesimal amount more than absolute zero credit. It's a totally irrelevant situation, and only solidifies my thought that you feel that you're better than some other teams because of the fact that they take advantage of engineering help.
I find your assumptions and assertions parochial and presumptuous.