Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I was wowed by Desert Forest in person. That said, I really wonder what type of reception it would get if built today. Certainly it would be a good course, but would it get a "best new" by Golf Digest (if that means anything anyways)? I'd love to hear more about why Desert Forest is still thought by many to be the ultimate desert course.
I'm a native Arizonan, so I've seen how desert golf courses have changed even in the past 20 years. The best courses being built today are definitely more strategic. They are wider, but it's more than that. If done properly, the fairways are set at angles, or have bunkers dotting the middle of them, that give the player the ability to choose his line of play. The older desert courses usually gave two options -- lay back with an iron, or try to hit a driver in a 20 yard wide area ringed by unplayable desert.
Are the older desert layouts much more natural? Yes! But it seems like the newer ones have an additional dimension that the older ones don't have. I'll throw out a couple of examples -- Stone Canyon and The Gallery, which are both just outside of Tucson. I think these two courses are heads and shoulders above the previous "best in Tucson" Ventana Canyon and La Paloma (Fazio and Nicklaus, respectively), and mostly because they were able to lay down more turf (at least in my opinion). At the very least, I think one could argue that the evolution of desert courses has been for the better in the last 10 years or so.
I don't think the same could be said of most types of courses, and I think that this is interesting.