Not necessarily. It's reasonable advice to suggest building something smaller first, but only because of the sheer cost and energy involved with jumping straight into heavies. They can very easily be a money-dump and an even bigger time-dump, whilst the reward of competing in a smaller class can be just as strong for less. Also, you inevitably learn a LOT in the first few machines you build. The cost of disregarding previous ideas and efforts in the heavy class is huge versus smaller classes.
That said, that didn't stop the guys in the 90s from going from nothing to top tier machines in one go. It's entirely possible as long as you know what you're getting into. And they didn't have the wealth of experience and information we do now, let alone all the off the shelf hardware available today. If you're set on HW, go for a HW!
Lightweights and middleweights never really took off in the UK, but one of the EOs (Extreme Robots) is building a (hopefully) spinner-safe heavyweight arena, which might revive interest in the intermediate classes in the coming years.
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