[d.courtney]

Sure I may just be a guy looking from the outside in, with never having attended the event, but after watching allot of matches on SOAP, I agree with most alliance decisions. Yes changing rules part way through may not be fair, or not being picked because you had terrible luck with this years random selection may not seem fair either but life is not fair, FIRST is not fair, if you didn't "make the cut" this year that by no means belittles the successfulness of your team, the truth is we are all winners, for even living through the 6 weeks and having something to show for it. FIRST is not about the competition, it is just the method they use to attract people to its goal, to inspire the youth of our world in Science and Technology. Yes we all want to win, but most of us also have a bias that our robot is better then it really is due to the emotional attachment we have to it, but sometimes we need to stand and look from the outside in and look at it as if another team were looking at our team.
Two years ago at GTR was the first time our team didn't go on to the qualifying matches, and I at the time felt we deserved to be on a team, by the end of that event we actually started scoring, and even in autonomous. But looking back one can see that we simply weren't consistent enough. In fact it could have been only the last three matches we did well in.
Also inflating your results is a terrible thing as Karthik has noted, sure sometimes scouters come around very early in the game asking how many you do, and if you don’t know how many you can score tell them that just that, or predict (conservatively), teams will notice the difference in what you said and what your getting, and getting more then what you said is always better then getting less. For instance I feel our team is capable of 5 tubes a match, but at the moment I don’t know how our robot will do under defence (we compete this week). And that’s just what I will tell them, but if we have a few practise matches under our belt I will tell them the average.

The point is teams will scout they way they want, Karthik noted that he would rather have an honest team, and some might look for a certain characteristic (ie they wanted defence not scoring on the rack)... and you can't object to a team scouting the way they want, they got to the place they did and deserve the right to scout the way they want without being critisised.