I agree with all things that both Pete and Dave have said, so I suggest we leave it at that.
There's plenty of people who specialise in the heavier weight classes who are perfectly accepting, and in some cases complimentary, towards ants (I remember getting a warm fuzzy feeling when Ian Watts praised the engineering on Zenith), so I wouldn't want any people here who've been less involved in these kind of the politics in the past thinking they were all bad on the backs of the experiences of some long-term competitors.
As for rules, as Pete says the rules on my site are a mirror of his. I need to upload the results from the past few AWS' before the next AWS.
From the above I get the rough gist that the contentious issues are:
Commercially available bots
Arena
Clusterbots
Number of ants per team
Ants vs other weight limits at events
I know PeteC is busy for the next AWS in Reading, if everyone else is around is it worth having a meeting and go through the rules one by one and get a draft v4.3 rules?
The problem with meetings at modern AWSs is getting the time and space to hold them! I would also suggest that, though the meetings are usually limited to committee members, the committee (plus people like Rory and Alex who should now be on the committee) is so big that there would probably be less people at an event not involved in it as involved, therefore the meeting may as well be attended by everyone, therefore it may as well be done on the forum when there's more time for it...
I spoke to Dave W today and he's going to try and gather together all proposals to put into a single thread on here that will be open to vote casting only without any comments and see whether that works well enough for everyone to be happy.
I think it would make sense to try and get as much finalised in the virtual world as possible and then if there are any remaining bits that need more face to face discussion, they can be addressed at the AWS. Unfortunately I can't come again as the dates clash with a course I'm already signed up for, but I will take part in the online debates.