Choose your own control-system adventure

[flameout]

1. Radio connection reliability -- this is a fairly difficult thing to achieve in FRC's atmosphere, and it often (in my experience) makes the difference between a fun event and a frustrating one.
2. Software reliability -- reliability is important, although software tends to be far more reliable than the radio, so I'm ranking this lower on the list.
3. IO capabilities -- it needs to be able to easily talk to the robot's sensors and outputs
4. Clean programming interface -- teams with all-rookie programmers (and possibly no programming mentors) don't want to have to fight with integer-only idiomatic C programming.
5. Processing speed -- this probably has more to do with software than hardware, but we've repeatedly run into processor performance limitations with the cRIO, and I've had to cut back on functionality to gain acceptable performance in the remaining systems.
6. Price -- I'd love to be able to buy a new controller each year and not have to tear old bots apart.

In general, reliability is important, and I don't want teams to be limited in what they can accomplish with the system (due to limited IO or performance issues).