The increasing amount of pre-canned code

[Racer26]

I can see the validity in "standing on the shoulders of giants". I can see the validity in using a gyro without fully understanding how it works via means of some 'black-box' code, the problems I see are when the canned code encourages teams to do things that they dont have the required experience to use even the pre-canned stuff. When they decide to use the pre-canned code because its /cool/ or /new/ and don't understand the reasons you might want something like a holonomic drive, and a basic understanding of how one works. At the very least, you need to understand what the inputs and outputs from a particular black box are, and how changing the inputs affects the output. If you dont understand that, but want to use that black box just because team x uses it and does well, then you're doing something wrong.

To summarize, I'm not suggesting that teams need to understand how the software crunches numbers. I'm suggesting that teams need to understand the mechanical aspect of how a holonomic drive works, before they try to implement a black-box routine to do the code part of it for them, and I'm not sure this is happening.

I don't have a problem with re-using someone else's code, so long as you understand the basics of what its doing to make mechanism X work.