So Antichamber developed this whole motor pairing thing, and I’m thinking: what if pairing between the mg lift and drive isn’t the only thing that’s possible with the idea. For example, you could try pairing the mg lifts and the lift, or the main lift and the chain bar.
This could certainly be done and was recently discussed in detail on one of the Discord VEX servers.
However, this will add complexity to your robot, and there is only so much complexity you could take before the overall reliability will suffer. You would have to try and decide for yourself if increased complexity and demand for extra maintenance worth the competitive advantage you could gain from sharing motors between separate functions.
The main criteria to decide if this makes sense is whether the tasks for which you want to share the motors are independent or need to be done in parallel.
For example, if you share the motors between drivetrain and MoGo lift and do not intend to drive and lift MoGos at the same time, then it is pretty simple once you build it right. There are robots which easily made it to local competition finals using this method.
On the other hand, if you try to utilize same set of motors for two different functions and execute them simultaneously, then you have to be careful not to overload individual motors. It could also be done, but you need to feel comfortable with doing some advanced programming, like adapting smart motor library to monitor PTC condition. If one of the motors had to pull double load, then you will need to give it some rest in the next few seconds to avoid tripping the PTC.
If the functions are truly independent and do not need to run at the same time, then it is straightforward - for the price of increased build complexity you get significant power boost for both functions.
If the functions need to run in parallel, then it is trickier, but you could still get a net power gain, if you build and program it right.
Did you have any specific design in mind?