If I could just mention something from sort of a "Freakonomics" point of view about the growth of the game, and the relationship of equipment, course length, difficulty, cost, slow play and so on.
Golf is NOT going to "grow" any time soon in terms of the number of golfers and/or the number of rounds. The overwhelming likelihood is that both will continue to drop for years to come. Many here will continue to blame a lot of things that exist tangentially with the decline, but are not causative.
Very simply, golf's demographic is upside down, and is going to get moreso. The golf boom was fueled entirely, IMO, by the Baby Boomers (and their families) taking up the game in large numbers through the 80's, 90's, and the first part of last decade. However, at about the time the recession hit, my guess is that most of the Boomers that were going to take up golf had already done so.
Equally importantly, as the first boomers began to reach retirement, my guess is that many simply were unable to continue to afford a very expensive game, or at least to play as much as they had in their high wage days. Again, the beginning of the Boomers' retirement coincided with the recession to a great extent.
Now you have much, much smaller generations with less disposable income and quite possibly less leisure time as well. This is a very bad recipe for golf, and it doesn't have anything to do with courses being too hard, play being too slow, and so on. It is an inescapable demographic trap. Even as the economy recovers, we will NOT see a return of rounds played to previous levels; it just won't happen. When you look to assign blame, don't point to technology leading to longer and tougher and more expensive courses, and so on. Those are just window dressing.
The result of all of this will be a continued reduction in new courses being built, and a slowing but continuing closing of existing courses that can't make a go of it. Those courses and clubs will survive that for some reason(s) are able to be financially viable in the new reality of golf.
BTW, I think that all of this has already happened to tennis, running 10 years or so ahead of golf. The tennis boom was just Boomers taking up tennis, and as they moved from tennis to golf, there was a golf boom and a tennis decline. As a Boomer myself, I can't bring myself to write what the next boom that we go through will be, but it will NOT be a sport...