[Koko Ed]

The one thing that has always got me is everybody seems to have this idea of how a FIRST team is supposed to be. No where on the FIRST website or in any of their manuals is there such a thing. So why would people readily assume there is some pre determined model for a FIRST team to follow?
Let's look at the pinnacle of FIRST the Hall of Fame teams: Many of them are the un GP teams that you freely accuse of ruining FIRST (they win alot of award often. Even after they won the Chairman's award) which is ironic since they had earned the top honor in FIRST doing good works to improve FIRST as a whole. They seem similar in structure when you give them a quick glance but when you look more closely each team is very different from the other and no one team has the science of running a team down than the other Hall of Fame teams. In fact there are plenty of teams who are not in the Hall of Fame who are just as capable of running a top notch program and they can do it completely different from everyone else. There is no set formula to this. how else can you explain 1500 teams can come up with thousands of different solutions to the same problem? You don't think FIRST didn't intend this to happen?
Diverse thinking I think is also a goal FIRST aims for so everyone can see solutions form many angles and inspire others with that as well.