Gota sell that sizzle! Personally I think that if your robot is more recognizable and rememberable (along with your team) it will be more rememberable to other teams for time to come. For 4 years now 1902 has have (what I think) very nice looking robots. We have a great sponsor who powder-coats it for us. However If you look at some of our parts; since we do not have a crazy amount of machining capability for cheap, we hand fabricate alot of our parts. If you take this years robot for example, we have an Aluminum tubing superstructure that mounts our hanging mechanism, and gives rigidity to our robot. There was no weight to powder-coat it so we wire brushed this part to give it that really nice Aluminum finish.
That is a little bit of what Exploding Bacon does
Hope this helps!!