Re: A return to television
because the robots run several times in a year to protect the wheels. The american bots are usually run on the philosophy of not wanting armour to bend into them from spinner hits. There's always plus and negatives points to this argument.
I wouldn't say that the feathers are any less showman like with the addition of spinners.
At the end of the day, it's two different ways of fighting for two different arena environments and it does show how different environments cause the robots to evolve in different ways.
Re: A return to television
To state the obvious:
There are more robots in the 220 than was shown. I think 27 total competed at RoboGames, including a few flippers (Son of Ziggy and KJO are both flippers but weren't shown on TV, and Bounty Hunter was shown, but not much...)
Discovery did post a lot of the unedited fights as webvideos:
http://science.discovery.com/videos/kil ... mackdowns/