I think it’s safe to say that it’s in the best interest (of most teams) to make a competitively advantageous robot. Much like in F1 racing improving performance by 1% might make the difference between a win and a loss. Especially in games were the score can be very close.
There are multiple ways to make marginal gains such as : Increase in wire gauge, Motor cooling, Pocketing gears, wheel selection, and so on. Unfortunately a robot is only as good as the one who drives it which means that 1% optimization will only ever be used if the driver gets a substantial amount of driving practice. What does your team do to optimize performance?
We get the mechanically/electrically/programming-ly unoptimized robot in the hands of drivers with enough time to shake it down, then optimize for practice and debugging time.
After trying it ourselves last year, I’m sold on the Canadian approach (1114 and 2056) of making things as simple as possible. Keeping it simple lets you optimize over and over again and never let any one area of your robot (programming, mechanical, electrical, driving) suffer.