While 5 minutes may sound like a dramatization, I very much agree with the rest of the statement.
VRC is mainly about education and that is achieved by having students to go through engineering design cycles, where they identify the problem, fix it, and test it. The more chances they have to go through those cycles the more they will learn.
Lets leave one-shot missions to the experienced NASA engineers and let VRC teams start with relatively forgiving environment and increase difficulty as they grow.
That’s why I like Signature Events - they let more advanced teams experience gameplay on their level and have time to execute more of those design cycles before the season ends. This way they could learn and become the next generation of NASA engineers, who will send spacecrafts on the 100-year journey to the nearest star.