It's interesting what Bob Crosby says and his remarks about possibly entering an new era that might not be the best kind like the era brought on by RTJ (and maybe Joe Dye, the USGA, Open set-up mentaility etc) of basically combining both length and narrowness in architecture. RTJ certainly added tons of length to architecture generally but he also had a consistent design philosophy of bunkering up both sides of landing areas--something that was rarely done in classic, strategic "Golden Age" architecture! What he did, in fact, is sort of narrow things down generally and "center-direct" everything!
So I certainly understand what Bob is saying and why he's concerned. Certainly architects today are struggling to find some reasonable architectural solutions to deal with the architectural problems brought on by all this increased distance the ball is being hit today.
In a very general sense maybe the way to do it is to combine increased distance and the placement of features such as bunkering out at increased distances not with just consistent narrowness and the ever prevalent flanking feature placement, as RTJ did, but to combine features in random placement and at random distances (to very much deal with a long hitter's driver too) with not just narrowness but with a combination of narrowness and WIDTH! Width and narrowness of short grass, in other words!
Think about it! If you did this there should be all kinds of ways (options and strategies) for a long hitter (even with his driver) to deal with these features with narrowing and widening short grass around them depending on varying risk/reward aspects of both distance and accuracy but much less consistently designed (randomly in other words).
Theoretically, in this way it would seem that a long hitter could still use his driver but with interesting accuracy risks and demands coupled with it. And for the shorter hitters these same features could come into play in the same way for their second shots and so forth.
One of the real problems with RTJ was not just the increased distances of his courses and holes but that he did that with some very consistent narrowness too! It seems a real solution could be to return to interesting combinations of feature placement but also to return to narrowness combined with some real width of short grass here and there! This was not much done by RTJ, but it could be an interesting solution or at least and interesting compromise now!
In this question and topic that Pat has suggested here, it seems to me the absolute best course to analyze is Pine Valley itself. The reason is it has a ton of "cross features" and also a ton of width too in certain areas! But the most interesting thing to look into at Pine Valley is what exactly is in and around those cross features and what the height of the grass is too in and around those cross features! I will go through a number of Pine Valley's holes and talk about how changing the height of the grass in these particular areas might just make a world of difference to the long hitter and help explain a bit about what I'm trying to say here with real examples!
I say this because yesterday I saw how a really longer hitter dealt with these areas and how he might have done it differently. However, even with a change in the height of the grass in these areas he may NOT have done anything different, and the reason for that is one I hope to remark on in the really interesting "13 AUGUSTA" topic!
Maybe a good analogy to think of is a lot of designers are adding a ton of tee length to holes like ANGC's #13 but because of the complexities of how tee shots relate to second shots, or next shots, they are not really able to keep the original strategies in place anyway. Most of the reason for this is the uniqueness in the way the overall holes are designed and set up to relate tee shots to second shots--where all their many features happen to be in relation to one another, in other words.
It's a bit like stretching only the first half of a rubber band without being able to stretch the second half of it too and all the unfortunate architectural and strategic meaning of that! Stretching the second half of the rubber band is probably possible, of course, with even a hole like #13 ANGC but then what have you done? You actually have moved the green fifty yards out too (as Whitten suggested) and how unfortunate and horrible is that to contemplate?
You could do that but you would have to move Rae's Creek fifty yards out with the green too, to keep it where it needs to be in the central strategy of that hole.
With ANGC and its incredible wallet I'm sure that anything could be done, even moving Rae's Creek too, but my God that would be something pretty amazing to contemplate.
If they could do it they do have the right man there to do it--Tom Fazio! Just think about it, he could actually redesign the entire landscape (all of it) so all the features could be in the same relative position to each other and also the drive to the second shot would be relatively the same for the new long hitter and the clubs he used on either shot in the same relationship to the way the older players played it. Maybe the nuancy little psychology of the hole could be maintained as well.
Think about it--it could be the same hole only its rubber band would be stretched equally from both ends. Theoretically that might keep everything the same as it used to be!! It would even look the same only its overall dimensions would be much larger. Same exact hole, only instead of 485 overall it would be about 560 overall!
Whoops--there's a problem. It could be done probably, but only in a vacuum! What about the routing itself?? It would obviously start to run into or bump into other holes and then you start to get into the real jigsaw puzzle of the routing itself. But what the hell, ANGC is supposed to actually have a lot of real estate generally. So maybe it's possible that Fazio could redesign the entire place, all its real estate, in other words, and have it look basically the same as it always has--just a much bigger course in dimension and scale--but it would look exactly the same!
Anything is probably possible if you have enough real estate and enough money but a better way would be to rein in the golf ball and leave the golf course alone!