I found your experience to be fairly common especially on the "professional" teams. Most teams are basically just ways for sponsors to live vicariously through

I found your experience to be fairly common especially on the "professional" teams. Most teams are basically just ways for sponsors to live vicariously through the kids. The actual mechanisms are rarely built and programmed by students, especially on teams with tons of sponsor money and engineer coaches. I'm glad FIRST seems to have finally noticed this and started the stock car equivalent of FIRST, which lets smaller teams actually be competitive instead of getting bulldozed by the team with the fancy logo and space age CNC'd robot with the all titanium transmission.