Dave,
I have mixed feelings about this issue. Even though it was fun to be restricted to 20' of timing belt and spending countless hours coming up with ingenious mechanisms actuated only by latex tubing (a lot of them!) and those nice springs FIRST used to supply, I consider that the overall level of competition has been
significantly raised since FIRST relaxed the rules concerning materials and parts usage.
One could also argue that this occurred concomitantly with FIRST's efforts to provide teams reliable, quality, out of the box solutions - chassis and drive trains, basically.
Many threads have debated the Inspiration issued associated with those ready solutions, but I will not go deep into that.
I have a
feeling (emphasis on feeling - absolutely no "scientific" evidence) that students are more inspired by an amazing robot that is well designed and built (thanks to those "permissive" rules) than by a specific jaw-dropping mechanism devised in a glimpse of geniality.
Of course, that's a moot point when you come to Beatty, because they're (very!) consistent in presenting us with a robot that is all of that. 
Then again, I can be very wrong, and maybe that's an issue to be discussed in another thread.
[CONTINUES...]