Most posts here show an great combination of GP and expressing a reasonable opinion. It is my opinion that this post shows neither.
You can still play defense. Even with bumpers. The difference is that now, instead of the defense being "look at us, we have experience, we can design a strong drive train and ram people", the defense takes the form of "we found a defensive strategy to counter an offensive strategy."
I also disagree that this makes robots look uniform. With coloring, and the fact you can use however much bumpers you desire (66% - 100% of the frame) and whichever shape you desire *cough*148*cough*, means that as with most years, robots look anything but uniform. Also, bumpers give rookie and young teams opportunities to add color onto their robot, without painting something that is likely to be broken or be worked on.
With your high speed hits thing, what a great way to be as anti-rookie as possible. Unfortunately, not all rookies get experienced FIRST teams to mentor them. Without any knowledge that some teams will be out there just to hit people as hard as they can, I am sure that many rookie teams would find it hard to do FIRST. You spend six weeks on building a robot, come to a competition all excited, until someone who has done this a few more times than you drives all the way across the field to hit you, to separate the "contenders" from the "pretenders"? I'm all for defense, if it's played intelligently and doesn't rely on brute force. However, if you design a game that can end up as a drive-train war, how do you encourage creativity? You're talking about all robots looking the same? If games end up as pushing and hitting competitions, all robots will look the same. And that will be a sad, sad day for FIRST.
This is why I like Overdrive. Even though penalties play a huge, excessive role, and some things leave to be desired, I still think that in many ways, it's a step in the right direction. Especially during eliminations, this is one of the more exciting and crowd friendly games I can recall. It also allows for a myriad of offensive and defensive strategies, with few of them relying on brute force and many on intelligent design, creativity, and strategy.
As for wedges. If you read the rest of my post (and I'm not blaming you if not
), I am not for wedges. They're another rookie trap, something veteran teams would know how to handle much better than rookies. They also lead to boring play (have you ever watched two battle bots wedges compete?), and to tipped robots. In my opinion, if FIRST is to encourage creativity, intelligent engineering, and hard work, then wedges should remain illegal.