Will we ever get a hint #2?

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Peter Matteson

The minibot you could see a few pictures and know most of the stuff we tested endlessly to figure out.

The flip side of the coin is that many teams, for whatever reason (i.e. not fundraising enough) simply did not have a budget big enough to really work on minibots. I know we copied entirely because we wanted to have something vaguely competitive without sinking $60 every time we made any kind of mistake. We didn't budget for that and we certainly couldn't add that unexpected cost to our budget once the season began.

So basically, the teams that could afford to really participate in the minibot challenge didn't get to keep their advantage, and the teams that couldn't afford iterative design could either develop a substandard minibot or blindly copy others.