[lukevanoort]

I'm not going to get involved in this discussion except for this comment. You cannot, and should not make assumptions over why or how a given team dynamic has arisen. I am aware of several teams (I'm not going to mention who) that have mentors do much of their robot building; students may do final assembly, but the sponsor does the milling/lathe work/CNCing/etc. In all the cases of this that I know of, the reason was INSURANCE POLICIES, it was not a team choice. The insurance policy in the teams' school/workplace did not allow the students to operate the machinery; thus, they had to either have their mentors do the machining or not use the resources at their disposal. I think (and I assume these teams probably think similarly) that not using your machining resources is foolhardy; those tools allow the team's students to get the benefit of learning about constructing/designing systems that require such devices (two speed transmissions, for example). Thus, by having their mentors machine their parts, the students are able to learn more about things that they otherwise would not have.