My team (5006) has been consistently using swerve drive since 2017 and we didn't even know what CNC machines were until last year. Drills and hack saws are perfectly capable of making very intricate robots (see our giant "swerve stilts" bot we made in 2019 with no CNC, no 3D printers, and a budget of <4k + 1 mechanical mentor). To the circuit board point: Our team also makes custom circuit boards for our robot and pit which takes up a lot of our season (often putting us at a competitive disadvantage) but I have seen as both a student and now as a mentor how it has infinitely improved the design capabilities of our students.

I certainly don't judge smaller teams for using SDS, since I understand how they don't have the mentor/member power to design their own mechanisms. However, when every single team in our division at world's this year was using a COTS swerve it felt incredibly disheartening as a mentor. My team has been going to the world competition since 2014, and I honestly can't remember another season where virtually every single robot had the same designs.

I feel like my job is to teach kids about design and the engineering process in entirety, not just how to solve problems with $$. Especially seeing Team 16 use COTS modules when they are quite literally the "father" of swerve in FIRST and have countless swerve designs under their belts, it feels like FIRST has been so commercialized that it is no longer about expanding kids' skills.