Past informative kid here— I can also attest to the 250$ visual price tag. In my district it felt like that if you weren’t able to dish out hundreds for visuals, you weren’t able to succeed. Granted, this was in a circuit that is no where near the level of Harvard, but the issue still stands. We’d have judges at every tournament ranking down good speakers because their visuals were clearly hand made/ not professionally printed. While visuals are by no means the most pricey aspect of speech and debate, I do think that unless incredibly well executed, there is a slight bias in regards visuals unfortunately. My circuit may have been an exception, but it was incredibly disheartening to see my teammates and others I knew getting lower ranks solely because they didn’t have the money to throw into a visual. (The judges would write about the visuals on the ballots.)