Team Update 14 (2016)

[PayneTrain]

I'm not so dense that I fail to understand it happens in VEX (and FTC, I guess?) but this is not the VEX Robotics Competition; this is the FIRST Robotics Competition. We have gone in year-in and year-out with strategic design convergence happening in FRC. The venn diagram of "teams with the resources to fly out to an event and copy a robot" "teams that actually need just that one key to be any more competitive than they are already" does not have a large cross-section. Last I checked, VRC robots did not cost thousands upon thousands of dollars and be built with a custom structure like all of the teams you just mentioned.