Shel, Thanks for your level headed input. You are right, the routing was/is just fine. Not great, not bad, but fine.
Sven, Thanks for that info. It doesn't stop the cramped feeling the course has/had. I recall enjoying the sequence of 3-8 and 13-16, but, that wasn't enough to make the course great.
As for the above reason the soft silica was removed, it sounds like revisionist history. That sand was always super soft and many balls with lower trajectories, that entered the bunkers on the fly, were sometimes lost. Nothing along the lines of falling in from it's own weight, if a ball had bounced, or rolled, into a bunker. The reason for the removal was part and parcel of not 'embarrassing theses guys' mindset, that still exists today, albeit, not as much. The sand was removed in the fall of the year prior to the tours arrival. We played the course the day the committee was out there making decisions on tweaks for the pros, in October, of that preceding year, and that sand was already gone.
I feel bad for the outcome of the golf courses new look and playability, for the public player in Chicagoland, and for Mr. Jemsek's because of the horrible reviews it's getting this week. They've owned that place forever and as Shel says, have been leaders in raising the bar for public golf in Chicago for a long time.
My hope was to discuss the errors of ways, so others might learn from it, but apparently nobody wants to talk or identify the mistakes, let alone do the dirty work of re-evaluating, and make suggestions to correct it. I wonder if it's because it's a public venue, the majority on GCA don't give a rat's ass?