[PayneTrain]

I think people that have difficulty separating the idea of international expansion of FIRST with any perceived shortcomings of FIRST from their position as a stakeholder are people who take issue with it. I imagine that is an incredibly small community.

There are issues in this world bigger than any one person, company, state/province, or nation can solve! A lot of STEM competitions default to an international scope, and I don't think FIRST and FRC should divert from that. FRC is a competition where economies of scale come in to play (the failed Brazil event, the slow march out in the East, and the fits and false starts to have an event in Europe) whereas the scale of FTC, VRC, FLL, IQ, and their cousins can get a field and parts (and completed robots and their teams) distributed across oceans at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cost.

The true power of FIRST and other STEM competitions comes from their ability to foster an inclusive and diverse community of people and the ideas of inclusiveness and diversity are not ones that you can waste time arguing about.

It will be very interesting to see how Manchester handles the evolution of FIRST that they themselves enabled over the last 5 years, into the next 5 years.