[lukevanoort]

Sensor feedback in autonomous is almost always better than dead-reckoning; in fact, the only situation I can think of where dead-reckoning would be preferred is if your sensor was really buggy and gave false reading often (in which case you probably should be using a different sensor). The question is like asking "Is it better to drive by looking at a map the whole time or by remembering where you want to go and watching the road instead?"

I have written both sensor-driven and dead-reckoning autonomous modes, but the dead-reckoning ones were always rush jobs that weren't expected to do much (like just deploy our arm). We use a hardware timer and interrupts for timing a dead-reckoning autonomous modes. If you do use dead-reckoning (many autonomous modes will have at least some time-dependent stuff, so the advice will probably apply with gyros too), I would definitely suggest using timers. Loop-counting seems like a bit of an unreliable and undesirable solution to me.