[JesseK]

Not specializing in gears is like giving up the 140 points on the 4th rotor. In rare situations, eluded to by Paul above, a 3rd robot may need to get 1 or 2 gears to finish the 4th rotor. Yet even in that case, I'd tell the 3rd robot to play defense rather than shoot balls.

So if you're doing gears, do them right - by only doing them. Hang if you find a solution for it with enough time/weight budget left.

Teams doing mainly/only balls already know there is a throughput challenge, so I suspect they're not going to also do gears.