How is it that, of the four people I know that want to limit the number of regionals that a team can attend, three of them are from Texas?
First off, I have an issue with the basic premise. The question "Do you believe that this money could be better spent in the interests of achieving the goals of FIRST if the money was not spent on attending an additional regional event, but on engineering outreach instead?" is problematic. The construction of this sentence requires that you subscribe to the precept that funds expended on ANY engineering outreach activities will be more effective at achieving the goals of FIRST than attending a regional event before you can answer in the affirmative. This is an absurd assumption, and I must hope that was not what was intended.
But therein lies another problem. Ever so many people have spent so very much time over the past weeks pointing out that when trying to understand written communications (e.g. game rules, Q&A answers, etc.) it is nearly impossible to determine the authors intent unless it is made exactingly clear with nearly endless narrative. We have been forced to the conclusion that using personal intuition, logical understanding, and just plain common sense is inappropriate when discussing anything to do with FIRST. Thus, I must put my hopes aside, and be forced into a strict interpretation of the exact words that have been provided. So we will stick with the absurd assumption and see what happens.
Simply put, there are LOTS of ways to spend team funds on activities that could be called "engineering outreach." A minimal standard of quality for any such activity has not been defined for us with this problem, so we have to run through a few examples to determine how they might affect the logic of the problem. Engineering outreach could include everything from creating a new mini-engineering expo open to the public, to printing "Enjiners R Kewl" on 186,292 buttons and handing them out at the shopping mall. Some of these activities will be worthwhile, and others clearly will not. Providing an exciting, detailed, professional quality introduction to engineering achievements and the FIRST program would likely be a worthwhile activity. Stabbing random people with the pointy ends of poorly fabricated buttons imprinted with misspelled propaganda probably would not be as successful at inspiring them. Given these two examples, we make the assertion that there exists a set of activities which satisfy the criteria to be called engineering outreach, but are ineffective at achieving the goals of FIRST.
Once it has been established that such a set of activities exist, then the initial problem statement quickly collapses. If the money is spent on an activity from this set, then it will logically be an ineffective use of the funds. We further assert that use of the team funds to attend a regional competition is an effective mechanism for achieving the goals of FIRST (if this were not the case, then why would so many teams sign up to attend a second event?). Given the surrounding context of the problem statement, we can equate spending funds in the interests of achieving the goals of FIRST as simply "money well spent." By substituting these qualitative valuations into the original problem statement, the problem is simplified into the question "do you believe money could be better spent doing something that is known to be effective, or something that only has a chance of being effective?" Unles you are a former top executive at Enron, the implicit answer to this question must always be "invest in the known effective solution."
Of course, all of this is academic because none of us ARE former top executives from Enron, and we are all able to do whatever we dang well please with our team funds. And that is just the way it should be.
-dave
p.s. and if you think that ANY of this discussion is really about the question that was asked, then you have missed the point.