Some more discussion:

I did talk with Scott Evans, the game designer, after the previous technology upgrade, from the RCX to the NXT brick.  The NXT was clearly superior, with more memory, integrated sensors, and so on.  As has been mentioned, the first year that NXT was introduced there was a "fairness bonus" for teams using RCX.

FLL and FIRST looked at the season results that year and did some analysis, and there was no indication that there was any scoring advantage for using the NXT brick over the RCX brick.

Why would this be?  The consensus among the Design Judges was that team experience with the technology was way more important than the new features.  There wasn't any learning curve for the new features, the experienced teams could reuse MyBlocks and other coding styles directly without changes, and just plain familiarity with the device was what was helpful.  Note:  it isn't clear to me whether the analysis looked at differences between rookie teams using one device or the other.

I can say that last year was the first World Festival since the introduction of the NXT brick that I didn't see any RCX-based robots at that high-level competition.  (There might have been one there, but, if so, I didn't see it.)

I suspect that this is why there's no penalty/bonus this year--we just don't know what the effect might be of the platform difference.

Over the years, among high-scoring teams, I almost never see a design that doesn't involve some changes of attachments.  Most of them left all three motors on the core robot body, for simplicity, but not all.  There have been many that changed out attachments with motors, and had a good design and had practiced enough to do it quickly and smoothly.

Certainly the best scoring teams at a tournament generally have not relied on a beat-the-clock strategy to eke out the last few points, even though that is really exciting during a match.  That's probably either because the robot was very efficient, or it was too dangerous to risk losing points available from completion of their last robot run.

This year as a referee and design judge I will be very interested in seeing how teams take advantage of the allowance for the fourth motor.  Will it be an advantage in flexibility and speed?  Will it be an extra complication in design, making the robot a little bit bigger, and maybe requiring some more complexity in attachments to use or compensate for it?  I don't know--that's one of the things that keep FLL fresh for me at every tournament.

Steve Scherr

VA/DC FLL Referee Advisor