[Eugene Fang]

Well in the past, very few teams even attempted to do any sort of vision tracking or got it to work properly. I'm guessing that FIRST would rather have more teams be able to have some sort of autonomous/vision tracking than have only a handful of teams who have the capability to develop the code themselves.

Also, I would like to mention that although the FIRST code works, there is definite room for improvement.

Edit: The hardest part each year (in my experience) isn't actually programming the autonomous mode, but getting the camera to lock onto the target reliably. Since FIRST solved that issue for us this year (actually I haven't tested the default code yet so I don't know how well they "solved" it), teams can focus on the rest of the autonomous mode.