Personally, I want 3d printing to be allowed in VRC whether teams are required to share parts files or not. I would still design and use 3d parts whether I was required to share the parts files or not. However, that doesn’t mean I like the idea.
I love having things be open source. I like that there are tutorials to do just about anything online, that there are large public code, and 3d printed parts repositories. There are reveals for just about every top competitive Vex robot from the last 5 or so seasons. I’ve even compiled information such as this for people to use within my club. The problem is not that there aren’t resources out there for people to learn off of, the problem is that people either don’t know where to look, aren’t motivated to try and learn from these resources, or aren’t even confident that they will learn from them.
Requiring each team to share their 3d printed parts files does nothing to help introduce people into designing their own parts in my opinion.
Personally, I don’t particularly care about another team using my design, why last year my team adopted a strict “Leek Everything Policy,” because we thought the value of getting our number out there was greater than keeping our designs to ourselves.
However, I strongly dislike the idea of forcing every team to share their 3d printed parts files. If I am forced into sharing my parts before I get to a competition, who am I actually designing for, my team, or the entire vex community. Why would I ever want to go the extra mile if all my work was going to be given to everyone else when I’m finished. Nobody would ever try to make a special 3d printed drivetrain transmission for their robot if all the days they spent designing it was time spent, not for their team, not for their club, but for everyone.
(I do not speak for them, this is purely assumption) Why would Pilons ever begin working on odometry if in the end they knew that their work could not simply be their own. And yes, Pilons did end up sharing their odometry program out of their own generosity, and this example was about coding, but the broad principle still applies.
In my opinion, If you required every VRC team to share their 3d printed parts publicly, you would both, not be helping newcomers and be artificially stunting the usefulness of 3d printed parts by getting rid of the motivation for teams to stretch the limits of VRC.