[miketwalker]

All of your questions have been answered by others, but I have to chime in and also say that FIRST is run by very few people. Those few people put so much work into preparing all of the items. I think for FIRST Lego League, the trophies are hand-built... with so many competitions I think they have a few people who do that as a job and assemble them (this is what I heard, I do not know if it's true), but even if it's not true... could you imagine the man-hours it would take to assemble that sensor and reciever?

One thing I would like to mention, if you feel FIRST is lacking in an area, offer to help out. I know Dez has done that and now works with scorekeeping, I helped write one of the autonomous manuals that will be up soon because last year many teams had problems and little documentation to back it up, and I mean... there is a VERY long list of people on this ChiefDelphi community who have thought to themselves "Wow, FIRST really didn't do a good job with such and such" but, instead of just complaining... they've jumped up and said "I can try to help a little bit, how can I help?" If you want to see a change in anything... don't expect others to do that, there's not enough workers at FIRST to do it all, you need to stand up and call them and say "What can I do?" That's the only way the program can improve, especially with the rapid growth of the program.