[JesseK]

I've never seen such a huge FRC crowd be so quiet as the one watching Einstein matches. While I appreciate the game's dynamics, and love how it opened up the doors to creative ideas in ways to do drive systems, it was downright boring to watch. Many of the regulation matches during regionals wound up with clumps of robots and trailers. It was difficult to tell who was doing what scoring, then all of a sudden the group would break apart and there would either be a pile of balls on the floor or a trailer loaded up. Without watching specific bots, it was hard to tell. It was a great game to design for and play though.

The fields weren't completely consistent regional to regional. We gave ourselves a 1/2" clearance...yet the bots sank 1/8" into the regolith, you needed another 1/8" to get over the seams (varying regional to regional), and the Atlanta fields were put onto a soft plastic floor which caused even more sinkage. Combined with another 1/8" reduced clearance to due material fatiguing (yea, our fault), Atlanta just left a bad taste in our mouth. We could take our bot to the practice field and fly around, yet on the Galileo field we kept getting stuck. I understand it was already very difficult to manage field setup this year in this regard, so I'm not sure if there's room for concern or if I'm just venting here.

I believe that next year we will have to help this year's rookies along if the field surface is highly tractive. There were several atypical drive train designs (crab/swerve) that simply will not work on carpet due to axial loading ... or at least they won't work for very long. I also expect to see some 2nd year teams with 4 wheels on the corners of their robots wondering why they're having difficulty turning.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that there were so many Michigan teams on Einstein this year, percentage-wise. I don't begrudge any of the teams who were there, and I applaud FIRST for finding a format that cuts costs and increases field time. It will be highly disappointing if this format is only used in Michigan again though.

I do not agree with the 40-lb allowance for future years. It's supposed to be 6.5 weeks, and it's supposed to be hard for a reason. Of the 3 competitions I attended it was only enforced at DC, and even there it was only sporadic checking.