[Josh Hambright]

the 3 years that i drove we had 3 seperate control setups, each one had its advantages and disadvantages.
When we had a crab drive we used 1 stick for wheel positioning and one stick as the trottle, this was great for that type of drive.
However i agree that with a tank drive you cant go wrong with tank steering, 2 joysticks, one for each side.
the arms and other mechanisms are a whole different story, depending on what is needed as far as controls go, we deisgned systems that used custom control boxes, with switches, pots, and buttons and we have used simple joysticks to do it.

My senior year of high school had the most advanced controls out of the 3, we had 2 stick drive, and we had a arm mechanism which was either manual controlled with a joystick or could be set in 3 preset positions using buttons. We also had a custom control panel on the OI with switches for doing things like turning off the compressor to conserve battery life, turning off the light because the old ones got really annoying in the pit, and doing other things.

Really to sum all of this up, i think it comes down to driver/operator preference. I found that the controls were tweaked to perfection throughout the year and that having the drivers be able to communicate with the people who design and implement the code and controls allows for the robot to perform exactly as they wanted it, in our case i was designing the controls which i was using, so they were exactly like i wanted them, and i could talk to the programmer and have him tweak things as needed if they weren't working the way i saw fit.