I'm just not totally convinced that the solution to golf's problems is to degrade the product. Flexibility is important, and it's clearly a good idea to design in shorter loops wherever possible, but it seems to me that if the issue is the time taken to play then we need courses that can be played more quickly while still delivering a full experience to the customer.
I'll make an analogy. A few years ago, in a different life, I did some work with a large food manufacturing company. They and their competitors were under constant pressure from their supermarket clients to engineer cost out of their products. The competitors went down that route, and did little bits of value engineering like slightly reducing the amount of filling in sandwiches, to meet the supermarkets' demand for a lower price. But the firm with whom I was working took a different approach. They said 'We are not going to reduce the quality of our products. Instead, we will keep the price the same, but we will continually increase the amount of filling, improve the quality of ingredients, etc etc'. And guess who is the most successful?
I believe that discounting is very rarely a long term successful business strategy. There will always be someone who comes along cheaper than you. Focusing on quality, imo, is a better strategy. In golf, to me, this means not trying to convince golfers that a shorter experience is what they really want. It means finding a way to allow them to experience the full product in a timescale that is acceptable to them. It means making golf a half day experience, not a whole one. Which means 3hr - 3hr 30 rounds. The challenge for the golf industry is to find ways of getting to that goal.