The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by AlecS

Not to hijack the thread, but both of those items are created specifically for FRC. Hex bearings don't exist outside of those produced for FRC. While Talons have great applications outside of FRC, Talons were created to cater specifically to the FRC market. So excluding game pieces, FRC isn't really killing the worlds supply of items. As far as things produced for FRC, I'm sure suppliers are working to hard to remedy such supply problems in the future.

I think what Shaun is trying to say is that oftentimes these FRC specific items(which is technically the "world's supply") get completely sold out, leaving the teams that rushed to get these items at an advantage over teams that waited a bit. The point is, with longer build season, this allows suppliers to produce more items so that teams don't have to instantly buy so many of them so early in the season.
EDIT: Shaun clarified with what I said above

However, I very much agree with what Alan Ostrow said, about how if there's an open build season, you will see much less disparity between designs. The minibot is an example, and, while I didn't personally see many Ri3D clones, I have heard that certain events had many of them. While I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, what prevents a team, competing only week 6(this example is avoiding the future implementation of district systems and is an extreme) from making no serious design progress in their robot, only to wait until week 1 of competition to see what design wins, and from there on, completely copy that design? I think that with so much time to iterate, we'd eventually see so many clones...How many teams would have had 1114/67/217 style climbs if they had a full open bag time?