Autonomous this year is just as important as it was last year. Not for the bonus, but to collect/score balls that your opponent cannot score. This year every ball you score is point values your opponent loses, so while it looks like only 10 points in the beginning, it is actually very important.
If you look at NZ finals matches, autonomous was used to position robots to hoard nearly all of the balls, depriving the opponents of balls to score.
I would say that winning autonomous is very important, because it also sets you ahead of your opponent early. I’m probably a special case, because almost every match that I’ve ever lost was because of autonomous.
Also, I would recommend reading this discussion from last summer.
The problem is the competition for the balls. If you score a single stack but your opponent scores a stack as well, or less but enough to win the bonus, they have a few precious seconds to reposition and gain stack control, whereas you’re stuck where you are for at least a second to shoot your stack. Even if they don’t score as accurately, you don’t have the ability to score the same balls that just missed and you have to catch up their positioning.
I believe you are misunderstanding how autonomous scoring works. You get all the points for scoring the balls (in your example, 25). In ADDITION, you also get 10 bonus points.
I think we can all agree autonomous is an important part of the game regardless if you secure a good position or score points, or both. I was lucky enough to watch a few of 360’s matches at the North Texas Regionals, and although they did not score any points in autonomous, they secured a very good position that allowed them to score at least 5 bonus balls consistently right off the bat (this is what I saw at least, I watched only a few matches from a distance). Securing a good position in autonomous is a good strategy for robots that are exceptional at fielding. It was only after I saw 360’s strategy, that I realized that securing a good position could be a better strategy for some robots rather than scoring points.
I don’t know if this is what Data was trying to say, but there is an advantage to waiting to shoot them since you will be guaranteed to hit all of those shots if you have a well built, accurate robot. If your try to shoot them in autonomous, you might get 35 points (25+10 pt auton), but you might also miss them all due to a collision.
Scoring itself is not important, but as the comments above emulate, ball possession in autonomous is very important. I would go as far as to say that matches will be won in autonomous at high levels at VEX Worlds this year, simply because an alliance will collectively capture 5+ stacks in autonomous.