[pauluffel]

Though the even-odd system lets alot of teams take part in the event, I believe that a more exclusive and performance based system would make the Championship Event more exciting and better overall. The award based system for robot design, performance, judges awards, &c seems to me to work quite well, so I would be interested in creating more qualifying awards and doing away with the even-odd.

Though I think there should be less teams competing or a more rigorous determination of which teams get to compete, I would love to see more teams and people involved in the event itself. Since I live in Metro Atlanta, I plan on taking my team to the entire Championship Event, regardless of whether our robot will be there with us. I would love to help work at the event as a volunteer and I know many other members of my team would be interested as well, so I think it would be good if there was some sort of volunteering system where teams that were interested in going to the Championship but had not qualified would be asked to volunteer at the Event for a day or two.
The more people at the Championship Event, the better.

As to when teams should learn of there acceptance into the Champioship Event, the Regional Events that they qualify at would be when they learned (if qualification was based solely on Awards from the same year as the Event). Although this wouldn't give teams much time to collect all the money they needed, I think it would be better to do it at the Regionals and teams that wanted to go the the Championship Event would fundraise enough beforehand to cover the costs of qualification.