[Sepsis900]

Yeah, I'm not big on the elimination of the ship date myself. Veteran teams can already plow their way through the rookies if they wanted to. Giving them another few weeks would only widen the gap, like everyone said.
However, I'm also not big on paying the cost of shipping 120 pounds of robot and 80 pounds of tools to competition.
My idea is that teams can utilize whatever method they want. If you want to ship the robot by way of UPS, you say so on the registration. If you want to rent a Uhaul truck and move the robot yourself, that can work, too. The only requirement is that the robot has to be at the competition site within, say, 24 hours of the ship date. You'd also have to drop the robot off in its crate and everything, so that it's no different from robots dropped off by UPS (or whatever shipping company you picked).
I think that would eliminate the heavy costs of shipping and the risk of your robot getting damaged along the way by careless people, but keep teams on even ground, since the ship date is virtually the same for every team.