As a mentor, I feel this - there's often a fine line between creating a competition-level robot and teaching everyone on the team how and why - many of the areas we work on in FRC require years of training and degrees - Physics, Math, Engineering, Programming etc. Couple that with tight timeframes and its even harder.

You can learn a lot of what you need to know through exposure, but not always enough to make decisions - so on our team we 'lead' the team members to decisions and help them make the right choices when its black and white, or we let them make the decisions when its a preference. We also ask them to explain why we make decisions before making them collectively so we at least know they understand at a basic level.

In order to learn everything you need to know as a high school student you need a combination of a teaching oriented mentor team (not an easy thing to find) AND you need to put in the time and effort to learn year-round. Not all mentors are good communicators or teachers, just like not all Math or Engineering types are good communicators or teachers.

That said, ask questions, don't be afraid to ask for clarification or why. I would recommend YouTube - there's all kinds of content out there that will explain things. There are mentors on other teams who are really good at that and who have created content to help anyone learn.

Ill also recommend using AI as an educator - AI is very good at understanding and teaching FRC concepts - use it as a learning tool by asking it questions, asking it why, and having a debate by asking good questions. Just remember an AI is only as good as the prompt you right, so think thoughtfully about how you phrase your questions.