Driving: Tank, Arcade or FPS?

[MrForbes]

This morning, before our programming mentor arrived, I suggested to some of the students that they see if they could get the robot running by themselves, and play around with it. After a while we got to discussing how to control it, whether to use tank drive, or arcade drive, with a game pad, or a joystick. A couple of them described the typical video game setup, where one joystick on a gamepad is used for turning, the other for forward/back. Something about "first person shooter". Anyways, after a while (and after the programming mentor arrived), they got it figured out, and now have FPS control of the robot...several students tried it, and were quite pleased with how easy it is to drive now.

I wonder, why it took us so long to figure this out?