People have to remember that the USGA has a Championship Committee that works hard to determine the philosophy behind their setup decisions in the U.S. Open. The guys on the firing line, Meeks and now Davis, are the ones who make the day-to-day decisions, but the committee is the body that makes the overall mission statement if you will.
I say this from experience, because when the USGA came to Olympia Fields, the committee had made a decision to not get so concerned about preserving par. One of the principal ways they did this was to decide, well before the event, to keep the rough at 3 1/2 inches, as opposed to the 6 inches plus seen at most similar venues (Winged Foot, for example). This was rather disconcerting to us at Olympia, because we wanted to see our golf course play as tough as possible. We wanted them hacking out of the bloody heather! The committee, however, after much deliberation (and probably defensively after years of criticism about brutal setups), decided to tempt the player to go for the green out of the rough, rather than just get back to the fairway. Their thought was that if they tried and failed to hold the green, they would wind up long. Long rhymes with wrong, especially at Olympia.
Unfortunately, the course was wet the week before the Open and it got wetter after the rough was cut. The greens, as a result, held all manner of shots out of the rough, no matter the length, and for the first two days, they just killed the course. Olympia got pilloried for being too soft and the fact that the course came back on the weekend when the weather shifted got lost in translation and the course and the USGA were smarting a bit in response. The quote that I made on the Golf Channel in prime time (unappreciated by the blue coats, but true) was basically: "The members are hurting because they're killing our course early. We don't want to be a one-year experiment of a kinder and gentler USGA." But that's what it felt like at the time, because the decision to cut the rough, although not a hasty one on their part (see above) was a gentle set up call that seemed to backfire. The next year, they got too close to the line and Shinnecock was almost unplayable in certain areas.
The point here is that the championship committee has been trying, in fits and spurts, to get a less brutal setup philosophy going and they seem to have settled in now under Mike Davis. That doesn't mean that Davis is a genius and Meeks was a rube. They both influence, but follow, the will of the competition committee. And each of them is subject to the biggest game-changer of all: the weather. Davis can have the softest setup in his head, but if it rains all week, that golf course will play like it's 8400 yards and it will be brutal, even if they can go after some flagsticks with wet greens. I got to know both Meeks and Davis and I think they are quality men. Davis may be in a better position because Meeks took the heat with the back and forth on the hard/softer/hard again pendulum that was going on for a while, but it all stems from the committee.