[Kevin Sevcik]

Slippery slope arguments are... well... slippery. Judging extremes is never a good bet, because it's easy to come up with absurd examples for anything. Viz.:

The Fighting Dumples have two possible bolt-on assemblies for their robot, constructed of extruded aluminum, and highly engineered cardboard boxes. Brilliantly, these two assemblies use almost all the same motors and pieces of aluminum and sprockets, just arranged in a highly different fashion. The base robot weighs 60 lbs. Assembly A's unique parts weigh 15 lbs, and Assembly B's unique parts weigh 15 lbs. The common parts between these two add-on assemblies weigh 40 lbs. So the robot makes the weight limit, and presumably the size limits. Sadly, because of the ingenuity and large reuse of parts, it takes 1.5 hours to disassemble A and reassemble it into B and vice versa. By your logic, since all the common parts are already there, the Dumples can have a perfectly legal and fully assembled A and B structure ready to go, since the common parts are "spares". Thus, the Dumples are saved 1.5 hours of frenetic building and can easily swap structures before a match.

While silly, this example is just as valid, and seems just as wrong. I think the point of the "fully functional" assembly argument is to prevent any and all weird interpretations like this from coming up. The point of mandating that the same drill motor be swapped, or that the motions atleast be made, is that there is obviously a secondary cost incurred to make this weight savings. Namely, however much time you need to move a drill motor.

We have been instructed to read the rules with a common sense sort of interpretation, and not be lawyerly. I believe the intent and purpose of this rule is to allow teams to be creative and use exchangable modules while limiting the possibility of Swiss-Army bots with several attachments suitable for any strategy. If teams will insist on an utterly clear, highly detailed rule here, then the solution becomes to pick between creativity and no Swiss-Army bots. The alternate configuration rule is a relatively recent addition, so I'd be cautious about pushing one's luck.