How on Earth are spectators meant to easily discern who wins?

[Madison]

Does anyone remember several years ago when it seemed like FIRST was strongly focused on drawing spectators who knew nothing of the event into the action by making scoring and gameplay simple to understand? The idea was, as I remember it, that a spectator walking in off the street could sit in the stands and easily and quickly discern which alliance was winning.

I know the ins and outs of the rules for this game and, while watching this VCU Webcast, I'm having an awful time deciphering who actually wins a watch. Sure, I can quickly glance and see that there are more blue tetras than red on the goals, but that doesn't make a lick of difference because of the surprise appearance of a million points worth of penalties at the end of each match.

The announcer is doing a good job of explaining, now and again, why the penalties are assessed and their value, but it's still really frustrating to have no idea who wins until the penalties are tallied up. It's not exciting; it doesn't create anticipation; it's simply irritating.

I know that there have been discussions about how to best implement a penalty system on these forums, but it seems to me that the end result is not really useful for making the game easy to understand. Additionally, given the six weeks we've just endured, I think it's valuable to ensure that these kids feel good about their robot and the work they put in. I can imagine how frustrating it must be for them to have spent long days and nights building a functioning robot that scores no points because of penalties.

Is anyone else as irritated as I am by both the overabundance of penalties and the obscenely skewed point-values assessed for such penalties? It doesn't seem fair for teams have deducted three times as many points in penalties as they score in a match.