This is a "critical" comment and suggestion for FTC and other FIRST programs, so let me say this up front: I have been involved with FIRST programs for six years at various levels, and I personally have benefitted and have seen others benefit significantly from their participation in these programs.
Now (slowly and gradually) to the point:
It seems as if there is a tradition of unecessarily avoiding amending the rules in FRC, FTC (now and previosly as VEX) and FLL. At times it even looks like a long-running inside joke for the official game rules responders to see how many separate rules they can combine in order to say "no" to some proposed robot design or strategy. Even when the answers are short, strategy or design questions are sometimes answered with a strained interpretation of the rules as if to say "do what we meant, not what we said."
I guess that this tradition grew out of the now discontinued practice of private responses to questions on rules and strategy. Under that practice, amendments to the game rules might give away the strategy or design ideas that prompted the amendments, so amending would understandably be avoided when possible.
Under the new practice of answering all questions in a public forum, this old reason for avoiding amending the rules is gone. But the tradition against amending seems to persist. How else can you explain answers like
this one from yesterday on the FTC game rules? A straightforward reading of the rules does not give the result in the answer. How does simply moving a plastic laundry basket have to "damage" or "tip" it? The rules committee seems to be saying "do what we meant, not what we said."
Why does this matter? Why should the rules committee(s) for FIRST competitions amend the rules instead of giving strained interpretations? After all, the interpretations, strained and otherwise, are all public now.
There are four main reasons, in my admittedly not too well-informed opinion:
(1) Amending the rules when needed, instead of giving strained interpretations as if they were plain, would help train FIRST participants in respect for the language of design goals and specifications, and would emphasize to them the need for and importance of written documentation, including appropriate revision and version control.
(2) Amending the rules when needed, instead of giving strained interpretations as if they were plain, would help train game design committee members in respect for the language of design goals and specifications, and emphasize to them the need for and importance of written documentation, including appropriate revision and version control.
(3) Amending the rules when needed, instead of giving strained interpretations as if they were plain, would give all subsequent readers of the rules the early benefit of the work of previous readers, questioners, and game designers/rules commitee members, with less difficulty and time than is typcially involved in studying the rules, then reviewing every forum post and answer, then synthesizing or harmonizing them to finally obtain an adequate understanding of the game.
(4) Amending the rules when needed, instead of giving strained interpretations as if they were plain, would over time create a more robust body of rules, and possibly an improved rules writing process, so that the FIRST competitions and the design excercises within them would become more like an innovation team addressing a well-studied need, and less like a corporate engineering group trying to decode what the boss is thinking, or what the corporate tradition will find acceptable, despite what the specification says or the market study concludes. At present, the typical looseness of the rules tends to discourage innovation.