The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Joe G.]

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the six week season should stay, at least for a while. Once the district system is the norm in FIRST, I could see an argument to go to a continuous build period. There are several reasons for this (burnout, I completely agree with Taylor on this), but one big one I haven't seen talked about much looms above them all.

Remember minibots? How much variety there was at the beginning of the season, for better or for worse? How a few teams spent thousands of dollars and incredible amount of times iterating to perfect the direct drive minibot? How after a few weeks of regionals, clones started popping up left and right, because teams and the rules made this possible, and everyone asked for them to never, ever be done again, partially because so many teams hit the ceiling of performance with identical designs?

I don't want to see the 120 pound robots become like this. I don't want a system where it's practical for teams to copy what others engineer. The 6 week period makes this impractical to do. With unlimited robot access, I could see teams doing complete rebuilds for championships, bringing even more burnout into play, taxing sponsors and giving a double advantage to teams with good manufacturing support, making FRC robots monotone, and resulting in some spectacular failures that wouldn't have happened by teams who try a more ambitious rebuild than they can handle