What's a good transmission these days?

[jpsaul7usa]

Intro:
Ok, so my team's tinkering around with the idea of making a continuous variable transmission after looking at this website. I checked out what CD authorities have to say on the subject and I'm fairly convinced that making a CVT for competition is beyond our current capabilities. It may make a fun ongoing project for our engineers and maybe some students (like myself), but, well, most veteran teams toss the idea aside for more conventional, practical, and cheaper designs. So before I go to my team and tell them to kill their motors on this one, I'd like to have a better design to suggest for us to start working on for next season. But as I browse through the forums and the white pages, I quickly make the following realization: I understand transmissions about as well as I do about how I wound up being in charge of our robot's drive train in 2003: 'Ooh! Shiny!'

Why's this guy rambling on so much?
So I see there are lots of people on this board who know a thing or two about gear ratios and torque. My small favor to ask is can the many transmissions posted on these boards be sorted by some very intelligent and, dare-I-say, genius individuals who can make it clear for those teams with little (or no) experience with these technical perplexities? Which would be the best candidates to build, test, and try to improve upon? What's the simplest? The cheapest? The best? Myself, my team (if they put the CVT on hold), and many other rookie and rookie-esque teams out there would be incredibly appreciative of this kind of help. If nothing else it'd be nice to see a debate of the latest transmissions all in one place for easy reference.

Oh, and I guess I should ask how does that design of a CVT rate among others?