I agree, that it is ambiguous the way term “novice” could be interpreted and that principles would need to be spelled out even before going into specific examples.
Few weeks ago there were a couple of posts in China Teams at VEX Worlds thread that I really wanted to reply to, but didn’t want to take it off-topic. However, it could be more appropriate here.
Unfortunately, what both @sarah_97963A and @MasterCole describe seems to be not uncommon.
I suspect that some adults may consider VEX as a more sophisticated version of LEGO, where you could give kids a box full of parts and then expect great results to happen through the magik of the discovery learning.
I have mixed feelings when I see a VRC team that made it to the States with a robot that has no bearings on the drivetrain or lift. On one hand, I should be prizing them - since they persevered despite the headwinds (and ridiculous friction losses of the square axles grinding in the square holes). On the other hand, while I don’t know the exact reason why there are no bearings, I feel bad for them, because either they weren’t given advice when they needed it, or wasn’t told to pay attention and learn from other teams or, even worse, had an option to get help - but didn’t.
I cannot help but think it were adults that failed to give them early guidance, when it was most important, resulting in a season with a lot of missed educational opportunities. There is a chance that some really dedicated kids will realize that there is a lot to learn to get good at robotics, and for the next seasons they will seek (with double the energy) necessary knowledge from their friends, teachers, and online resources (like what @sarah_97963A and @MasterCole are doing).
However, I afraid that for each team that keep doing VEX, there is another one (or more) that simply gave up and left.
Even though it may seem obvious in retrospect that, for example, you need bearings for the square axles in the square holes, I couldn’t blame kids for not figuring it out on their own. Not everyone is like Gauss. I did plenty of embarrassingly dumb stuff at that age.
Unlike the simple LEGO contraptions, to build a VRC robot, that is competitive on the State and Worlds level, you need to understand much more than you can feel and touch with your hands.
For example, back in the Nothing But Net season to be competitive your flywheel had to be much more accurate than what was necessary for the Turning Point. My son’s team had flywheel that was almost accurate but still somewhat unstable. It seemed like all you had to do was to tweak a few PID coefficients, which they did for weeks without any improvement.
The technical problem was the large amount of measurement noise from the round-off errors of the encoders running close to the top of their speed range, and the solution could be as simple as one extra line of code applying exponential smoothing to the input measurements. ([1], [2], [3], [4])
However, it was much harder to overcome non-technical issue with their interpretation of the VRC “student-centered” rules as “no advice shall be taken from an adult” (especially if it is one’s parent, lol). I understand that proving independence and refusing help is a perfectly normal teenager thing.
When we teach physics, we don’t give each student an apple on the first day of school and expect them to independently derive Newton’s law of gravity by the end of the year. Instead, we teach students theory and help them to understand it through guided lab work and exercises.
Similarly, you cannot realistically expect students, that didn’t even take Principles of Engineering or Calculus 1 classes yet, to independently arrive at understanding of advanced topics like dynamic torque balance or how PID relies on derivatives and integrals, let alone how measurement noise affects stability of the PID control.
You can accuse me for trespassing into the brightly colored territory, but I couldn’t just sit back and watch my son’s team struggling to tune their flywheel because they had no idea what measurement noise was and would refuse to accept any help. So, while not forgetting that it is their robot and it is up to them to decide what code goes to the competition, I borrowed it to run my own experiments. Then I posted results to the forum for everyone who may have similar issues to see. Turned out the problem was common and other teams were struggling as well. If somebody else had solution - they kept it very secret.
Only after solution was made public and other people found it useful and started adopting it, then my son’s team decided that, maybe, they should give it a try. 
Eventually, I posted our flywheel PID code to the forum in case it could be useful for anyone else.
Luckily, students’ desire to excel in VRC makes them much more receptive to the advanced topics. My philosophy here would be to take advantage of such educational opportunities and maintain fairness by making answers and help available to any and all teams that want to learn.
I hope everyone agrees that the end goal of inspiring and educating students could be achieved best by balancing of students’ doing their independent work and adults providing them with supporting (age appropriate) knowledge. It is just tricky to get that point of balance right.
I wish RECF could, actually, add to the document more encouragement for students to accept help from adults in a way that is fair for everyone, and explicitly point adults to the resources at STEM Labs http://education.vex.com, where they could find both additional educational materials and guidance on how they could help students to learn, without crossing any red lines and giving anyone unfair advantage.