I'm seeing the original point was more about trying fancier mechanical things than teams are capable of, and less about how much code you write...?
As was already alluded to FIRST has come a LONG way. Teams now have the option to try crazy things like meccanum drive because they dont have to design their own gearboxes with parts out of the small parts catalog and program in PBasic (yup thats what I programmed my first robot in! Ever try to implement your OWN random number generator??? UGH!). Anyways, FIRST has a struggle to keep the old veteran teams excited, interested and the kids attempting newer challenges every year, while allowing rookies to compete at a reasonable level with them. The ONLY way to do that in my mind is to make sure everyone can start with something.
Back in 1997 it was common to see a robot that couldnt drive... there WAS no Kitbot drivetrain... that revolution was huge!! That kitbot allowed 1511 to come up with something fun the first year - a 6WD center traction corner omni that could drive circles around some of the veterans... that was because we already had a frame and gearboxes in our kit, so we could play with some more advanced features. Had we had to design our own gearbox, we never would have tried it. And you guessed it when the gearbox failed, we took it apart, figured out what was failing and put it back together. it was a struggle, but we learned how a gearbox worked AND got a fancy drivetrain.
I also am very much of the opinion that you learn MUCH more when you fail than when you succeed. If everything is easy, you arent trying hard enough or challenging yourself enough. Starting with the black box gives you somewhere to get running, when something stops working, you start poking around at the edges and tweaking the interfaces... when you wonder why the box does xyz instead of yza, you open up the box and look inside, and work from the outside in until you understand it. Thats called reverse engineering and its done all of the time and its how many of us gain knowledge we might never have had.
And I agree with Chris, as long as teams arent turning around and pointing the finger at FIRST for making things too hard, or "giving" them failed code, then we are all on the right track. When you start blaming someone for a "gift", you are wrong. So what if the gift causes you to struggle a little bit, if you can try to do so much more because of it, even if you fail, if you learn from your failures, you HAVE succeeded.
In short, I'm all for anything that makes teams get creative, think outside the box and do things they might never have done before... kitbot or code-wise
