The way I see it, there's constructive criticism (good) and then there's just b*tching, which is how I would classify much of the complaining here (and last year as well). They don't want to improve the situation, they just want to keep the status quo that they are comfortable with, and the h*ll with the rest.
As for the Kwikbyte experiment, one poor implementation should not cause us to stifle all innovation. I wish you could see my response to the KOP survey from last year - the Kwikbyte DS was a real piece of cr*p, and I let them know it. But I also made sure to include some comments about what was wrong with it, and how they might be able to make it better. I applauded the initiative to give us something better, but roundly booed the implementation. Time will tell, but so far it looks like DS v2.0 has a much better chance of success.
Most of the IFI lovers seem to be multi-year veterans who most likely had good, knowledgeable mentors who could teach them the mysteries of that system and how to maximize its potential. They came to know it and love it and still wonder why anyone would need anything else. They may think it was "bulletproof", but what they often forget is that it was a very daunting platform for most kids who were probably encountering their first embedded programming platform, usually without any kind of expert guidance, and certainly with very little entry-level documentation. Until Kevin Watson came along and cleaned up the code and wrote a little documentation, most ordinary teams were lucky to just get a drivable platform working. And forget about a mere mortal getting any kind of camera image processing working!
If we really want to grow the FIRST experience, we need to make the steps to success as easy as possible for teams that don't have a full staff of experienced engineers from a large corporation at their beck and call. To my reckoning, the new control system (plus the vastly improved software libraries) is a good step toward that,
plus it gives the veteran teams lots of room to expand and stretch the limits of what is possible. The best of both worlds!
