[FTC]: The View of Penalties in FTC vs. FRC

[Monty Python]

I'm interested to get people's thoughts on this because I think there's a pretty significant schism within the two communities. Allow me to preface my post with my acknowledgement that both approaches have their merits and that while I definitely have my preference as to the way I prefer to see the game played, I don't mean to criticize those who don't adhere to it.

In FRC, the mindset seems to be that penalties exist for a reason. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the general mindset seems to be that strategic acceptance of penalties is totally fine. If you can gain more by committing a penalty than the penalty costs, you should do it, and the only things a team can never do are the things that are expressly banned.

In FTC, it seems to be a much different story. In FTC, the mindset appears to be one where the penalties are rules with a sort of moral authority, to be obeyed regardless of whether it's more strategic to break the rules or not. I recall someone mentioning that they viewed 40 point penalties as things the GDC never wanted you to do.

My old team always took what we deemed the FRC view, of taking penalties whenever it was strategic to do so. For example, in last year's game, had we come up with an efficient way to do it, we were more than prepared to latch onto the rolling goal briefly before the end game in an attempt to better line up with it in an attempt to score more batons. We were unable to come up with a way to effectively do it, but that doesn't change the fact that our mindset was always to follow the rules to the strict letter of the law with little to no regard of the spirit.

I'm curious as to what other people and team's views are as it applies to both strategically breaking rules as well as playing the game more aggressively considering my team's view was always to take every advantage possible without breaking any stated rule. Let's say a team is ok with breaking a rule and taking the penalty, would that same team be ok if they could gain a strategic advantage and possibly win a tournament by aggressively harassing a superior offensive robot, pushing them all over the board and preventing them from scoring?

As stated previously, I would say yes, take every advantage possible within the rules, that's why the rules exist. Trying to guess at the intent of the GDC was, in our opinion, useless. The only thing we know for certain about what the GDC meant was the letter of the rules they wrote down and the amendments to the rules manual they published post facto. Trying to play the game itself consistently with GP meant, to us, taking every advantage possible to win a match while simultaneously doing everything possible to help other teams and raise the level of competition all around off the field. On the field however, we were going to do our best to win and we hoped other teams would do the same.

tl;dr, what are people's opinions on trying to play matches according to the strict letter of the rules vs whatever they deem is the intent of the rules?