Bob,
I very much enjoyed your essay and thank you for posting it. I especially appreciate how well you put Behr's writings in their proper context. He is a bit difficult to comprehend, but reading him with the Crane debate in mind clarifies his position on a number of points. And the debate still very much rages on.
I do wonder, though, if perhaps in presenting Crane you give him a bit too much of the benefit of the doubt, and are a bit too dismissive of Behr's arguments (as well as MacKenzie's and others) as creating "strawman caricatures" of Crane's position? In my mind the Penal vs. Strategic distinction, if accurately understood, hits on something fundamental about different ways to view golf architecture. Where I think Behr and MacKenzie and Macdonald and others fundamentally differed with Crane wasn't with the severity of hazards, but was rather with the proper role of hazards and other features in the first place. After all, whether you call it the Penal school, the CPP school, or the Equitable school, wasn't Crane talking about using the features of the golf course to punish what Crane considered bad shots? And the worse the shot the worse the punishment?
You state that calling his approach penal distorted his real purpose, which was to distinguish between good shots and bad:
For Crane and others the point wasn’t simply to punish missed shots. It’s not a matter of retribution. Rather, the idea was that missed shots needed to be punished because that is the best way to reward good shots. And vice versa. That is, if you didn’t impose “controls” on shots, there was no equitable way to sort out good from bad play.
Setting aside the flaws in Crane's premise that there was a need to further distinguish good play from bad (as if bad play wasn't itself punishment) his methodology was penal in nature. In any penal system punishment is almost never the end goal but instead is almost always a means to an end, whether that end be rehabilitation, general or specific deterrence, or simply the separation of criminals from the rest of us.
Also, Crane uses the term "Control" but to connote two related but sometimes conflicting concepts. The first is the "control" that the golfer may or may not have over his golf game. The second is the "control" that the golf course supposedly places on the player. The problem is that because most players have limited control over their golf game, the concept of the golf course placing a "control" on the player is largely a fiction. No matter how many bunkers or how much rough, no golfer can always control whether or not the golfer hits the middle of the fairway. At least I know I can't. So rough and fairway bunkers don't really control much of anything, do they? At most they might control where the golfer would like his ball to go. And when used as Crane suggests, isn't the real function of these features is not to control the shot, but to magnify the negative consequences of not hitting the ball as Crane would view as ideal?
In short, I guess when I read your articulate description of Control, Proportionality, and Predictability I cannot help but think it reads a bit like an essay describing a well run penal or criminal justice system, with many of the same goals and rationals.
Again Bob, I really enjoyed the Essays and thank you for posting them. I have quite a few more thoughts and comments that hopefully will come later.
DM