[GeorgeTheEng]

In terms of the cost, FIRST used to be more flexible on the shipping issue, at least with a single regional. In past years (as late as 2003 or 2004), the method getting it to the dryage was up to the teams. For local events, our team used the school pickup truck to drive the crate over (yeah you still needed a crate). Depending on distance (the farthest we drove was Baltimore which is about 2 hours for Annapolis dryage), it was not real expensive. Basically lunch and tolls. Now I beleive you have to have a truck with a 48" bed. I forget the exact height, but basically a semi or commercial van that can reach a loading dock.

As for the extra time. I'm mixed. Personally. I take a long weekend immediately after the ship date. I don't want it to continue for an extra few weeks. My team doesn't have the resources (money or mentor-wise) to build a practice robot. So some extra time probably would help.

At the same time I work in an industry where billion dollar contracts can be lost because of missing a deadline. I worked on a large team doing proposal for the government that was due by 5pm on a certain date. At 5:01 our whole year long effort would not even have been accepted. The company actually had the proposal printed twice, sent in two separate trucks an hours or two apart to make sure that if the first truck ran into an issue we'd make the deadline. So yeah, deadlines can be important.

Finally, I've worked with enough engineers to know that they will tweak, and tweak, and tweak a design until you take the item physically out of thier hands. And often those tweaks end up hurting the overall design. Time is not always your friend.