Tips to make your team a contender?

[DarthCoder]

So the team I've been a part of has been around since Rebound Rumble, and in our last two years we've had some small tastes of glory. We've consistently been able to get into the semi-finals at the district events, but we keep falling just short of making the finals. We also haven't ranked very consistently high in the qualification matches, and we've been all the way up to 7th at one point in a competition and then fell back down to around 18th. We don't have a huge budget or a huge team, but we really want to make it over the hump and go for a championship run next year. It seems that the most successful teams are quite active in the offseason, so I figured now would be a good time to make a thread about this. Are there any teams on here who have had success and could provide some tips on taking the next step to break past the semi-finals? Both offseason and build season tips would be great. How does your design process go? I've always been fascinated by how the top ranked teams are always able to figure out the optimal strategy and build their robot to perform it without having played any real matches yet. Like how the top teams this year seemed to all have in-place stackers at the feeder station and some could even make multiple 6 stacks in a match.