I am also still confused here. I asked Paul for clarification when he said “the bad behavior it encouraged got to a level that the benefits were outweighed by the negatives.” That’s a pretty serious indictment of the skills qualifications which doesn’t reflect the conduct I’ve seen from teams trying to qualify from skills. If plate-swapping was the only thing being referenced here, this would be a ridiculous reason to remove the spots given that the GDC position on plate swapping changed from:
to:
between November and March last season. This possibly left some teams in California (which according to a poster in this thread is one of the “problem” regions) who had qualified multiple teams through skills using the same robot in a situation where it was legal at the time they qualified, but became illegal at a later date. It is totally unfair for anyone to blame these teams or the skills qualification system for these issues when it is directly a result of the GDC position on R1 changing part way through the season.