[texarkana]

This is doing real damage to FRC. I feel my respect for FIRST and enthusiasm for the activity diminished, and I sense the same in others. I have always strived to have my students embrace every lesson that FIRST teaches, but not this lesson. That winners are really losers, that it is just as good to be lucky or sneaky as it is to be excellent, that the system will hand you reward even if you don't earn it. Trying to force more equal outcome for everyone does not work in FRC any more than it does in real life, and it discourages excellence just like it does in real life. I cannot explain to my students why their ingenious robot is very good at winning the game, but not at winning the tournament, because I do not understand it myself. Whatever abstract goals were envisioned with this system, they are lost in the real application of it. If implementing the ideas in the "coopertition" patent was needed just to legitimatize the patent, then I wish it could have been experimented with somewhere else. FRC was thriving and was not broken, but was "fixed" anyway.