Jeff,
I appreciate that you realize it is work. The whole point about creating a system that aggregates bias is that you're not doing science, you're just finding a way to collect individual views. But like everything else, it takes an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes work to make the system function as a system. If individuals want to disagree or argue that the lists are off, fine. That's their prerogative. All I can do is present the results and hope we have raters who are open-minded, educated and not starry eyed.
As for the state-by-state list, like everything else we do there's no definitive science. It seems to me (it's my call) that South Dakota, Alaska and Rhode Island, for example, all have a pretty narrow base of quality public golf to offer; whereas California, Florida, Arizona have an awful lot. So the former get 5, the later get 25, and in between there's a relative distribution of 5-10 (NC, SC)-15 (NY, NV, HI)-20 (MICH)-25.
I suppose we could simply list all courses above a certain baseline, whether 5.0 or 5.5. If 5.0 were the cutoff, we'd have 65 in Cal., 25 in Michigan, 17 in Nevada, 2 in New Hampshire and Tennessee; 650 in all, about 50% more than we have now. Hey, I kind of like that idea. If we had the cutoff at 5.5 we'd have a total of 330.
Oh well, now I'm gong to spend the next hour exploring the spreadsheet possibilities.
Meanwhile, I can also tell you that as much fun as is it is to configure ratings along different dimensions, we'd still publish a list that provides the best 5-10 or whatever for each state because the whole point of that list is provide a readers service to everyday golfers in each if the states as to where they can go in their state for quality golf. So in that sense, the state-by-state Best Course You Can Play list has a slightly different audience than the Top-100 Classic and Modern.