Is it required to use 2017 control system?

[Jaci]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I will remark that it is highly inconvenient that you have to update everything to the 2017 versions during build season. Our team has recently moved to a persistent framework from which we build all our code, and updating all of our legacy code to work with the new versions of all the software is a huge job. It'd be lovely if this stuff could be released a few months earlier...

You can access development versions of WPILib from their github page and from their maven.

If you want even more stuff, you can always apply to become a beta testing team.