[Al3+]

It's been my impression that the purpose of ship date is to impose on us an artificial time constraint. 6 weeks is hardly enough time to build a robot. But it just means we have to exercise good time management.

This is why team 840 did not hold back anything this year, even though we really could have used some drive practice, we believed it was against the spirit of the competition.

Also, having no ship date would intrinsically cause some unfairness. Say that Team A and Team B both attend only 1 regional, Team A's event is on week 1 and Team B's event is on week 5. Team B gets 4 extra weeks to build their robot! Even if they don't try to "copy" successful designs, it doesn't change the fact that they are much more prepared for their event than Team A is.

Then again this is assuming both teams only attend 1 event, which wouldn't be the case under the district system. Still, timing differences would be an issue. With ship date, the same deadline is imposed on every team.