My wish? make the BuildBlitzs/RobotIn3Days projects go away...

[Chris is me]

To be perfectly honest, the only teams that built exact copies of the RI3D shooter (as in, linear shooter with 2 cims and 2 pneumatic wheels) were teams that definitely would not have been able to come up with their own workable solution. Every other team I saw that was inspired by it used elements of the design and then prototyped on their own, changing it when they felt they could make improvements to it.

No one gets this outraged when teams in 2012 copy ideas from 2006, or when teams in 2011 copy ideas from 2007. Is RI3D really different?

You guys talk about "stifling the creative process", but all these "creative" robots you saw low resource teams building instead of RI3D variants didn't work. Teams that know how to pull off creative still did it anyway, and teams that didn't had a starting point to work off of. I really just don't understand how anyone could think RI3D made 2013 worse.

The thing that also gets me is that people are commenting about how *other* teams copied the RI3D. How exactly does anyone have the authority to say how much of the experience was taken away from these teams? We say "live and let live" when it comes to mentor involvement, but when it's RI3D stuff suddenly we're all experts on how other teams run...