[Steve_Alaniz]

Being a mentor is a delicate balancing act. Mentors bring "life experience" and skills that come from years of working with materials, tools and having seen solutions to problems that might help with the robot build.
But FIRST is all about the students. The mentors are only there FOR the students. That's not always a lot of fun but the compensation is having a lot of responsibility. Or so it seems.
For example, safety is everyone's responsibility but this especially falls to the mentors since they are the Responsible Adult. The same can be said about design. Just from an advantage of age, mentors have probably seen more mechanisms and understand their design and have a responsibility to present ideas or even explain why they might not think your idea is a good one (ouch!).
In the end, the mentors could probably do it all by themselves but that would totally defeat the purpose of FIRST. The other extreme is allowing a totally hands off approach which denies the team the advantage of the mentor's resources and experiences.
Mentors have to know when to let people struggle with a concept and when to step in to help drill, tap, cut when there is a time constraint. Sometimes, help avert failure, or even disaster. (I'm not saying mentors can't be the cause of either failure or disaster, but they bear the full responsibility of the results. A student cannot be held to the same accountability because they ARE the student.)
Mentoring is a very "check your ego at the door" job. I've presented various concepts from time to time and have had them rejected by the students. No problem. There is always more than one way to skin a cat... (I know 6) and what may not be the best method, in my opinion, may still work.
So being a mentor is not about pushing students around to force them to do it MY way, because that has so far, never happened to me. (except when it comes to safety glasses... you WILL wear them!) I AM enthusiastic. I want to share what I know and I have to do that in a way that doesn't sound like I'm being pushy.
All I'm saying is that it is not always easy to know HOW to mentor so I'd be surprised if any team never had some friction between students and mentors, but it's not some kind of Student Versus Mentor game. Please allow the mentors the benefit of the doubt and that they are trying their best to help you achieve in FIRST because it really isn't about Mentors, it about you guys.

Steve