Allot of time and money went into the 2004 controller. It's good enough for what it needs to do. I would rather see the current controller expanded to support a co-processor bus or port and a supported communication protocol.
This way an advanced team could add co processors of their choosing and have a standard to interface with the First controller. Example: a co processor to read interrupts from drive train encoders and then send
total distance traveled and calculated velocity for each wheel to the robot controller when polled. A co processor to track the IR sensors and do the position calculations. I picked up some microcontrolers from
http://kronosrobotics.com/xcart/customer/home.php
this summer for our team to look at as coprocessors.
Gary Deaver