I mean you should expect around 1000 eur for one robot because even basic robot with pololu motors, pololu drivers, pixy camera and some pcbs will alone get to somewhere around 600 eurs since you still need to consider the pcb cost and a lot of other small components like display, voltage convertor, batteries and compass. Now this is considering that the new team will never do anything wrong and wouldnt fry a single thing and every idea will be the perfect one used for the final robot. What i am trying to say is that production cost is also a huge factor when making a robot. This year our overall spending were almost double the combined cost of our robots
Also we already got 2 categories that can be utilized by new teams(light wieght and entry) i am not saying that you should from the get go dive into your own object detection done by camera and do your own drivers. But i am saying that there should be a room to improve to, since most of the teams that get into robocup stick with it. Also raising the voltage limit can help newer teams since there is a higher chance of finding some better motors lying around, in case the voltage limit would be higher. Also limiting teams from getting too good is just counter productive for the whole competition also i doubt there is a single team here without sponsors and if there is one money were never issue for them to begin with. So the money factor isnt really that big and i believe that acquiring sponsors is also a skill and if you are able to get more sponsors you should be able to utilize it to its potential.
Also the idea of new teams not having enough money is simply false and we cant really judge the economical states of new teams. The thing is that in my opinion new teams never stand a chance against a team doing it for 5 years since they had time to perfect their robots. Maybe it would be even better to raise the limits of what robots can do contradictorary to believe that there should be an upper cap for robots. This could prove to be a good idea since you have more room for improvements and are not that heavily limited which causes to sharpening the robots to the absolute perfection within the given restriction. What i am trying to say is that lets say that wehave a team that is doing soccer open for 5 years in first 2 years they made a robot that gone to the world robocup and were able to use succesfully maxon motors and now for their next 3 years are just polishing their robot to the outmost perfection meaning a little room for improvement and absolute domination with their robot over the newer teams.
To summarize my point I think that right now the starting point for the newer teams is quite okay saying this as a team that this year made our second no lego robot for open and was able to win almost half of our matches in world competition and the only thing unfair about soccer open is that there are teams with triple your experience. Which is quite understandable. And giving teams to make a little better robots just makes the competition more fun for everyone even the older teams.