I like the idea of having the lower competitions more closely mirror the FIRST experience. This was always one of my bigger problems with FLL and VEX. They were often advertised as stepping stones to FRC but they never really panned out that way. I judged a FLL event one that was fairly autonomous from FIRST and the only time they mentioned FRC was "oh by the way there is a high school competition similar to this, blah, blah" and this was at the very end of the event. Don't get me wrong I think that both FLL and VEX have merits on their own for sure. It would be cool however to see more direct tie-ins and I suspect this would help teams quite a bit with recruiting. The only place I would differ from you concept is that it become a class while I think that the "FIRST Class" model does work in many instances it is not always as accessible as a FIRST team especially if there is no one to teach it, it gets caught up in red-tape (at a High School never!
), etc. I've seen lots of teams go to the sports model which has worked well for us and use their VEX teams as essentially Freshman/JV FIRST teams this works well from what I have seen and it gives the underclassmen something to be the stars of and to own.
My 2 cents,
Justin