@bkahl - Apologies for repling to my own post, but I do want to add something:
I just want to re-iterate my view related to Shuhari ( What Can Be Done About Blatant G2/R2 violations? - #33 by Mentor_355U ) in the context of Vex.
I do strongly believe that some level of “copying” is a necessary step in the development of skill mastery. I hope that the RECF agrees broadly with this even if we may draw the lines in different places.
I disagree with some of the wording in the Q&A response, in particular “It should be clear that this final implementation is not an exact copy of ANY other original design.”, but I cannot come up with a clear and concise alternative phrasing, to allow what I believe (and I think others would agree) there could be legitimate reasons for the final implementation to be an exact copy of some other design.
But this comes back to trusting the RECF’s judgement in applying this rule appropriately. I know many may be suspicious of the RECF’s ability to do this impartially, but I think that we need to assume they will probably apply this only in clear-cut cases, in the interests of maintaining the competition’s overall integrity (e.g. both from a false-positive and a false-negative perspective)