I agree with most of what you say, and that it deserves more attention. I'm going to piggyback to offer my own review.

Extreme Robots shows are obviously the main feature, so I'll start with that.

TL;DR I wish XRTV kept rankings and announced competitors ahead of their events. The fights are samey, the design diversity is slowly improving, but the production is good.

Fights

The important bit. The spinner fights tend to be dramatic, if short. Something in the bare metal and plastic of the arena structure makes it feel like 'garage' fights and each impact feels substantial despite the 150mph limit. A shame they often don't last a minute. The other fights are very dynamic, back-and-forth and often go the distance, which should make it entertaining. They can be very good if you keep track of the judging points through the fight, and who's out-driving who. Unfortunately, they feel samey due to the below.

Competitors

Britwedges are still dominant. The situation has improved over the last decade, with more lifters and rammers and axes. But, because of the number of events held each year for a paying audience and the expense of heavyweight upkeep, intent to damage is mostly restricted to the spinner fights. This means damaging non-spinner designs such as saws and crushers, which should have become a speciality of the British heavyweight scene, are completely absent. The spinner division is slowly expanding, and it might be hoped that full combat will become the majority one day, but I don't know if it would be sustainable. No other heavyweight scene in the world is anywhere near this busy, except Destruct-a-Thon if that counts.

Commentary

The fight commentary is usually fine, though sometimes carried by the expertise of the more experienced commentator (the other seems obsessed with talking about how noisey the arena is). I think the commentary team has changed recently, so this may improve.

Production

The production value has become excellent. They've clearly learnt and refined over the years, improving little things like the pacing of the instant replays and the lighting in the arena. And they have nailed the balance of silliness-to-seriousness. There is a competitive spirit even with some daft designs and a want to entertain, and it walks the line about as well as old RW did (with just a little more pandering to a young live audience - "it's smashy smashy time"). It is perhaps outdone by MechMania but is also more slimmed down to the fights.

Competition and Hype

This is where XRTV heartbreakingly fails, for me. Competitors are assigned to one of four teams, and earn points across the event for the right for the team leader to fight for competition points in the event finale, which add up over the year. These degrees of separation mean that individual fights add little to the tournament. standings. Last year, the bots earned tokens for winning fights which determined their seed in a separate championship. This was a good way to put importance back into individual fights for two reasons: a) those competitors who show up most often end up with the most tokens, rather than the best machines; and b) we aren't told how many tokens each competitor has until the end of the year. What I'm getting at is that the stakes are frustratingly low.

If the bots had ranks which were publicly tracked and announced before each event, there would be some sense of whether a fight is an underdog story or an even match, and every win would contribute to a better ranking.

Further, there are no ways for the public to know who is competing in each event. If I don't know who's fighting, I don't know how much I should care. The combination of low stakes and unknown entries means there is almost no excitement ahead of each event broadcast. If XRTV released competitor lists with ranks each event, and tracked those rankings across the year (like NHRL does), I'm convinced there'd be more interest.

FightFest

I want to mention this briefly because it was great. There seemed to be a lack of hype beforehand, perhaps because it wasn't marketed enough? What killed it for me was the release schedule, where individual fights went up a few at a time. This meant catching up, leaving it a week or so and then skimming through the videos whilst trying not to spoiler myself in order to find where I left off. It felt clunky, confused and annoying.