FRC...autonomous or driver-controlled competition?

[tribotec_ca88]

I got this topic idea from this thread: ("Capping Vision Tetras")
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=35033

Some of the messages from that thread really made me think about this whole "autonomous period vs. remote controlled period" thing. The debate going through my head right now is: should FIRST be giving more emphasis to the autonomous period (and extend it for more than 15 seconds?) or should it be leaning toward the remote-controlled aspect of the competition? I personally am still confused about this...I think the game still seems to be slightly unbalanced between the two. Even though I am in favor of extending the autonomous mode time, I can imagine that this would be an uninteresting move to make when we consider all of these teams that have no programmers...is that what we want? To leave them in disadvantage? Or to inspire students to expand their knowledge in autonomous programming? Well... what is FIRST's objective, exactly? To turn FRC into a battle-bot game or an "AI" sort of contest?

What do you think?