Personally I think that a ship date extension should be dependent on the team, there are teams that get away without any weather/flooding etc. problems, for them, the ship date is the ship date. However there are other teams that lose a week every year to weather. If you are that team that lost 10 days of school thus couldn't work at all on your bot (or any number), FIRST should be able to extend your ship date by that amount. Saying they shouldn't simply because in the "business world" you can't get out of deadlines that easy is silly. FIRST isn't trying to emulate the business world, they are trying to inspire young kids, if they were going to emulate the business world, we would see many more awards for things like teams that can make the most duplicate robots, or one for the highest ratio of effectiveness to cost (yes they give awards for effectiveness, but never relate it to the cost to produce). Is that FIRSTs goal? no, yes they have a few business awards, but its not their goal, their goal is to inspire kids, and to allow a level playing field for them all, which in part is why there are rules like the deadline and FIX it window.
Every year we attend the debriefing for Ontario, and well tell everyone we lose a week every year. There are two reactions, the skeptical reaction we get from FIRST and 80% of those there thinking we are either exaggerating and it isn't possible to miss this much, then there is the second reaction of how do you do it of about 10% of those there. We do it, and have learned to do it every year, yes it makes things like autonomous hard to work on, and rarely do we ever have a mechanically fully refined robot, but we still can play the game to our best and we don't get stressed out over not placing overly well, because thats not the point, the point is to inspire, and we are able to do that. To date we have missed 9 days(this includes today), because of weather, we live in a rural area, 90% of our students and 100% of the mentors live outside of the town, and when the roads are closed there just isn't a way in to work. Comparing us to every other Ontario team doesn't do justice to the situation, our team (and three others) live in the worst part of southern Ontario with all the snow and wind coming off Lake Huron. See
link for a typical February day in our area (we are north of Goderich, in the customize window you can add "minor cities" to see Kincardine).
I do realize my thoughts on the subject may be a bit biased only because we miss a week a year, we have learned to deal with it, but a week missed is a week missed.