[Donut]

Really autonomous needs one thing to get better; incentive. Without a reasonable incentive to try, autonomous will not get the resources over teleoperated mode, and it will not improve. There needs to be multiple tasks that can score or otherwise contribute to your alliance, and they need to be of varying difficulty (and of course, varying reward as well). 2006 proved that if the autonomous mode is made important, teams will at a minimum try to move (the "254" for 15 seconds auto), far better than the sit and do nothing that has become customary in 2007 and was back in 2005 as well.

Autonomous must be given more point potential to takeoff, and if the games are designed with weak autos because it is believed too many teams don't have the programmers to try it, then the autonomous mode will continue to remain unused and pointless. If there are really worries that few teams will be able to do it even if they try, then I advocate doing part of the game as an "optional" autonomous; teams can complete the task(s) during a certain part under human control, but if they elect to instead throw an "auto" switch and do the task autonomously, they will receive a 2X (or even a 3X) multiplier for all the points scored. This is not insurmountable, since a team can focus on driving only and try to outscore the autonomous machines in the normal match, but it gives a substantial bonus to those willing to try it, and eliminates the "waiting period" that we've grown accostomed to at the beggining of matches.

I think all of the time periods so far have been more than enough for the tasks, if FIRST comes out with a very time consuming task for an auto they could extend it more, but I wouldn't push it too long (either that or I'd mix it in with teleoperated mode, as I stated above).