Bill's Blog, 5/11/11 "Wait, Did he say pool"

[Taylor]

Originally Posted by XaulZan11

This year's game was good for early weeks, but pretty boring at the championship (the diminishing value of tubes, imo, really killed the game when played at the highest level).

I found the opposite to be true. At early regionals/districts, there were too many no-shows, boxes-on-wheels, and incomplete programs/robots to be terribly entertaining; when the really good robots were winnowed out, the games became more exciting.
I do agree with your notion of the tubes becoming less important as the minibots became more prevalent, though.