Is allowing a practice robot good for FIRST?

[russell]

The thing that most worries me about practice bots, and some of the richer teams, is that to rookies it seems as if those teams have a mentor to student ratio of about 3:1, and that basically this competition is designed for teams like that. I worry that many rookies will not return because of this. On the other hand FIRST is supposed to be about learning. The best solution would be for them to supply teams with enough stuff to build two robots. This would promote the concept of designing before you build (something my team sees no reason to do), so that you have a design to work off of, even after ship date. It would also level the playing field by bringing the bottom up, rather than the top down. Then again it would be incredibly expensive. Whatever.