[Adam Y.]

It is particularly annoying when success is measured by the simple metric of 'numbers of teams started' and not by the much tougher metric of 'cultural change'. Number of teams started (kept) should be evidence of cultural change and not necessarily that change has occurred.

One metric is actually measurably and debatably not that far off from cultural change. The other metric is completely arbitrary in terms of being able to subjectively make any sort of goal off of.

It may in fact may not even include robotics. The world of STEM is much larger and much richer than robots.

If you want a problem that applies to as many engineering discipline as possible then you should build a robot.

I first became aware of a pending change away from the VEX platform in FTC when the name was changed from FVC to FTC. By that point we had already invested several thousand dollars into VEX kits and components.

Im not disagreeing with you in any way shape or form but didn't you ever find it odd that the several thousands of dollars was prominently labeled v.5 in some places? To me that either implied a funky numbering system or that the hardware was actually going to change in some respects in the near future.