Tom D said:
"If any one of them had spent six months on a construction project somewhere watching a course get built, he would most likely understand more than the rest of them put together."
When it comes to matters relating to golf course architecture, I'll defer to Tom Doak every single time, obviously. But I will say this:
In my past life as a sometime writer for television biographies/documentaries, I spent six months in a series of rooms taking part in the making of a one hour sports biography, from pre-production to shooting to rough editing to client approvals to recording voice over to the final cut. In terms of my writing, it turned out pretty well, i.e. I was nominated for a Gemini, our equivalent of the Emmy. In terms of the project as a whole, I saw how every single day and almost ever single minute is about facing and overcoming challenges (technical and otherwise) and coming to hard-won compromises and sometimes difficult decisions.
It was a great and important experience (and one that a writer rarely gets, mostly because most producers don't want another pest in the room). But you know what? I'm not sure it's an experience that made me a better writer, or a better 'conceptualizer' of ideas. I'm actually almost sure that it made me worse, in my eyes at least.
And I'm not so sure that writers should be 'exposed' to all those challenges/compromises -- first off, I could've intuited most of them beforehand; secondly, there's one place and one stage only during which a project can at least try to reach some ideal/pure form...and that's in the writing and the writing stage.
In short, I think that it's best if the writing stage can at least allow for the possibility of dreaming big dreams and of seeking perfection....while knowing full well that only a small fraction of the ideal might survive the 'production phase'.
There's an old saying - "In matters of virtue experience is a vice."
Peter