I believe there are ways to make the indirect tax a real penalty, but as Dave said in the other post it's tough to make the penalty severe enough to matter a lot when you're hitting wedge into a green. When you're real good you're going to stick your wedge close all the time.
I had the same thought as I was reading this thread. So much of golf strategy is made irrelevent by execution -- either good or bad -- that at times it seems the architect is really just satisfying/amusing himself and few armchair archies who know enough about this stuff to understand and appreciate it.
We're all affected by what we see on the tee, but the excellent player is competitive more because of the quality of his ball-striking than his thinking, whereas the poor player can brilliantly analyze a golf hole, choose the proper strategy and still make a snowman.
How many of us fall into a middle category where our decision-making is crucial to our performance? Well, it's all relative to the score we expect/want to make, I guess, but I still think we're on some esoteric ground here.
I was playing with Dan Kelly the other day on a short dog-leg right par 4; the right side of the hole, all the way through the green, slopes from right to left, and a bunker guards the right front corner of the green, where the hole was cut that day.
Dan hit what looked to be a perfect drive down the left side of the fairway, leaving him a sand wedge to the green from the ideal angle. I faded a 3-wood into the right right, up on the hillside, leaving me a wedge -- with the ball well above my feet -- over a bunker to a hole cut close to the right side of a right-to-left sloping green.
Turns out Dan's ball ended up a foot or two off the fairway in thick rough; he gouged it out but it caught the left edge of that front bunker. Mine was in light rought; I hit kind of a miracle shot with a lob wedge that cleared the bunker, landing on the right edge of the green and trickling down to five feet from the hole.
I know that's just an anecdote, but I'd been thinking about the outcome on that hole for a couple of days after we played it, and this thread reminded me of it. Sure, I'm still going to try to drive my ball where Dan did; sure, I had to get lucky to get that close to the hole from where I was. But more often than not, that seems to sum up what happens in golf. You plan, you screw up, you make a new plan, you get a bad bounce, you make a new plan, you get lucky, you putt and you go to the next tee to make a new plan that isn't terribly likely to matter.