[JesseK]

My apologies for the tone of my post. Here it is again, a little wordier and friendlier.

There are no consistent ideal scenarios. There are flukes, lucky matchups and whatnot, but it's just not feasible to count on an ideal scenario. The original argument implies an ideal scenario. Shooters will never consistently have open field in front of them, making the time difference between them and lifters negligible (assuming equal drive trains & driver capabilities). It's like racing between stop lights: it doesn't matter if you do 50mph or 30mph between them, you still get a green light on the 2nd light at the same exact time.

It will be a strategist's alliance that wins Einstein. Shooters may score the most hurdling points, but it's doubtful they will cause the greatest score differential between one alliance and their opponents: it's simply too dynamic of a game.

Tit for tat, shooters have no inherent advantage in the finals as a single robot. Everything one alliance can do the opponents can probably do too. At least in 2007, we could strategically place rings or litter home zones to consistently aid the score differential in the future; this year it's all unpredictable & moment-by-moment by which point no 1 bot can steal the show.

Even hybrid mode will be unpredictable since 3 bots all have to make the same left turn at the end of the runway, and then pray their opponents aren't in their way on the other side. There will be no "consistent" hybrid modes after the 2nd line. We can probably count on each highly-engineered alliance to get 32 pts at the end of hybrid...but then again so can the opponents. The only advantage shooters have here is that with a massive amount of luck they might make it around to hurdle in hybrid before time runs out. This will hardly be enough to weed out every other style of bot before Einstein.