Beyond the 40% minimum requirement, should a Judges panel consider team performance (Teamwork and/or Robot Skills) ranking to choose one Excellence candidate over another? That is, if judges cannot agree on team A vs. B, can they use performance ranking as a tie-breaker?
With so many other awards already rewarding performance ranking, it seems unfortunate for Excellence to also bias towards the highest performance. Moreover, since Excellence "feeds into" Regional Championships, and Regionals already weight performance ranking as the secondary invitation criterion (after qualifying awards), allowing rank to influence Excellence (beyond the reasonable 40% cutoff) introduces yet another way that invitations to Regionals are biased towards the highest performance teams. It seems like it'd be a good idea to explicitly discourage the use of team rankings to choose the Excellence winner, again, beyond using it as a cutoff. Otherwise, we may as well just say "Excellence = Highest Ranked Team among the Design Candidates". I don't believe that's in the spirit of the award.
Note that this is a follow-on in some ways to Q&A #1833. It wasn't clear from that response whether it's OK for judges to use quantitative data (ranking) to make a decision that, as you noted, should be fundamentally "qualitative".