I will revert back to this conversation has run it’s course and the forum has a search feature. Joseph replied (sometimes directly to you Blaziumm) in the previous thread that you linked. You can see his thoughts there. No need to recycle this again.
Drow & Sidoti have both been in this thread as well.
If your teams choose to be inspired by their bots, I hope they credit the source and go through many iterative designs to improve upon their starting point. If your team doesn’t want to ‘play the game this way’ that is up to them as well.
My most active team has about 3 designs they want to explore so far and none of them are this robot. We will see where the season takes them. Perhaps they will even do a reveal and their student design inspires whatever meta may come from this season (and there will absolutely be design convergence by next May, regardless of the source)