[KenWittlief]

Yes -Dean Kamen knows how to fix the problem:

from last years kickoff meeting: "at some point in the next six weeks you are going to start feeling like you are involved in a robot building contest. Then you are in serious trouble" -DK

the fix for the problem is to not take the competion so seriously - you got to test your robot against 30 to 60 other teams for 3 days and see how well your design worked - that is the purpose of the event - not to see who can build the best robot in your area

if the competition was meant to be a serious contest there would be serious prizes - like scholarships and large grants of money to every person on the winning team - and the contest would be one on one - no alliances - so the best robot would be the one that wins - and you would not see teams helping each other during the build season or in the pits, or encouraging schools to start new teams - because people would be focused on the prize and would not want more competition to beat to have to win it.

The fix is to not take the games so seriously - its intended to be fun - to be a learning experience about engineering and teamwork

the only way to fix the problem like you want to would be to turn FIRST into something else.

If you go home from a FIRST competition feeling like "we got screwd" then you dont "get it".