What was there before AndyMark?

[sanddrag]

If I recall, teams could only purchase materials from Small Parts, and were limited to a very short list of other allowed materials up through the 2002 season. For example, you could not purchase gears from any source other than Small Parts. In 2003, the short "materials allowed" list became a modest "materials prohibited" list.

Before AndyMark, teams had to actually THINK and design and fabricate things. Teams such as 716 and 45 published whitepapers on how to make shifting transmissions. Teams intricately studied the details of each other's designs, rather than waking up and blindly asking dumb questions like "how many wheels does your robot have?"

It was a very different era, and some elements of it are certainly missed. As limited as it was, I do miss the old Small Parts and their old catalog. It may have been very over priced, and I probably didn't buy much, but they had some neat unique items.

Now back to the modern day, what I can't figure out, is you can essentially buy a very competitive robot, with the right combination of parts, but a very large percentage of teams still produce very poor robots, many of which are incapable of assisting their alliance or scoring any points at all. What gives?