If a robot tips the way the game is now there's always a bit of risk that you'll get hit, but in general the other drivers don't want to drive on your tipped robot. With autonomous at the end I think we'd see a lot more damage to tipped robots.
Also if the game is anything like this year's game it would be WAY harder to score (how is the robot supposed to know which spiders are full & which are available?).
But if the game were similar to Aim High I think endgame autonomous would be way too easy as long as the drivers collected balls & positioned themself in front of the goal prior to autonomous. Then their autonomous would just have to run their scoring mechanism.
Also doesn't FIRST usually have some sort of bonus at the end for ramping or hanging or something? (I honestly don't know as the only FRC games I've seen are Rack & Roll and Aim High). I would think the point of that would be increasing collaberation between alliance partners (definitely a point in 2007) and perhaps also giving "simpler" robots a chance to earn points even if they don't have a scoring mechanism. Do we really want to replace this with an autonomous period (which we have already)?
Sorry for the long post -- the more I typed the more stuff came to mind.
