The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Taylor

Perhaps it's the parity that makes the uberbots so compelling.
If we all had unlimited time and budget to design and build robots, we'd all have designs that score 15 discs autonomously from the top of the pyramid.
But we don't, so the teams that can do that are few, far between, and a-m-a-z-i-n-g.

Surely you don't believe this is true?

The great teams are pretty close to the upper limit on performance. They can't get that much better. Maybe 5-10%.

The pretty good teams can probably get a lot better. Most of them probably not quite to the level of the great teams, due to resources, mentors, design skill, etc, but pretty close.

40% of teams have no hope of ever getting anywhere near the great (or even pretty good) teams, IMO. The best hope would be that if you make build an open process the teams in the first two categories could have the ability (through more time) to help those "lower tier" teams to at least build functional robots that could meet some minimum standard of competitiveness.