I'd like to see FIRST go back to bumper quantity rules like 2008.
I believe in 2008 something like 75% of your robots perimeter had to be covered by bumpers. This was a good trade off between function and protection and some teams used it to
their advantage
Also, I never want to see a 10"-16" bumper zone again, EVER. I understand that having bumpers that high was the only way to make bump crossing work, but the side effects of this were just too much. It seemed like every other match some random defender would be pushing a machine up on one side of their drive and holding them there which was far less likely to happen with the lower bumper zone of 2008 and 2009.
As far as "Mandatory" bumpers go, I'm torn on the subject. There's part of me that doesn't like anything to be Mandatory, but at the same time I feel that bumpers make robots look better in most cases.
One thing I'd love to see added to bumper rules is a specific and required supplier for bumper fabric. Most teams use fabrics from the same vendors, but occasionally you'll see a machine with some random fabric that looks like crap and is clearly different that the standard fabric.
Red and Blue bumper colors were a cool idea, but I don't want to see it happen again. For as long as I've been watching FRC competitions I've never had a problem figuring out which team was on which alliance, but I can see how this could be a problem. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the old school rotating light from 2002-ish for differentiating alliances. I'm sure someone could track down a similar and more modern replacement for this.
I'd like to see bumper decoration restrictions go back to their 2008 and 2009 standards. We decorated our bumpers in both
2008 and
2009 and I think they looked great and we got a lot of compliments on them. I don't see why we shouldn't be able to do this now.