Cookie cutter game design

[Ringo5tarr]

I know that that is a sort of click-baity title, but I have no other way to describe it, and this is nothing against game designers, this isn't even a complaint, I'm saying this to not only help us as a community to point this out, but also for strategy purposes (examples later).

FRC seems to use a cookie cutter for their game design, or perhaps a checklist might be a better analog, they seem to always have so many vague things to cover, and slight variations may exist in between to show difference, tell me what I miss:

-Autonomous that scores some sort of points for simply moving
-(Somewhat optional) Autonomous that scores more for more advanced options
-Main scoring (the highest points for the hardest task that can be done multiple times, or perhaps a middle score for middle points)
-Secondary scoring (less points for less effort, for teams who think that doing less effort may get them more points in the long run, forming strategies)
-(Optional) Tertiary scoring (Something unrelated to the previous two scoring options, but still scores points)
-Endgame with (Optional) Climbing (Usually the marking point between good teams and the kind of teams that win events, however thats correlation, not causation.)

SO using this sort of cookie cutter, a rookie team last year could have decided before the game was even announced that they would build a bot that could achieve the moving autonomous, secondary scoring and tertiary scoring if they had it, or they might say, the best points will porbably come from the main scroing, and go for that. So then immediately after the game was announced they could spend minimal time on strategy and begin design, but I don't know how useful of a design strategy that is, so take this with a grain of salt please