[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Welding is not a requirement for a competitive FRC robot. I would personally try to learn to work with Aluminum as well as plastics. Both materials have strengths and weaknesses and having more options in your arsenal means you can build the best robot you possibly can.

(And I hope I am not being too transparent about ignoring these puns, they clearly don't add anything to the discussion)

While I agree with you for many potential components (I'd think making an AL swerve module would probably be a much safer option), a lot of times for our team there would be little benefit to building the robot out of aluminum when our resources for building that component out of polycarbonate are significantly greater. Take this year's robot, not a single structural failure, and we fabricated the robot faster this way than we would have if we used aluminum. In some cases it's better for our team to use polycarbonate only then. The tricky part is when we come across a game that basically requires a very strong, light part that isn't protected by foam bumpers...