[mahumnut]

The entire system this year is ridiculous. From the 70 point penalties because of missing the ball return ONCE, to the buggy classmates, to their having to accommodate for two different types of bridges and booting up the new bridges before the old bridges, to the glitchy scoring sensors (as seen at the VCU regional, we lost 17 seeding points because of this, I mean how hard is it to have humans keep track of 4 goals as opposed to last year with a whole bunch of crazy stuff flying all over the place which was all tracked by humans.). This year was full of glitches and bugs and rule misjudgments, however, the volunteers and field management staff all handled these problems very well and provided for a reasonably smooth experience.
I heavily agree with your suggestion of tethering the robots and driving them off the field. In D.C we had a few matches where we weren't able to establish comms and were only able to sit throughout the match. we were then blamed for having a faulty CRIO which we all knew was code for "There is something wrong with our system and we don't have the time to diagnosis it so live with it" which given the pressure throughout the day was a reasonable response, but being able to tether the robot and drive it off the field would have just been that much sweeter.