Tom MacW:
It seems like you asked this same question not long ago. No matter, this time you asked it in a particularly interesting and evocative way! In other words, your few questions are ones that really make one think about what a routing is, what a good one and bad one is, and also what a routing ISN'T.
Jeff MacD, said some interesting things too but he talked a lot about a routing plan. A routing plan is not a routing, just a two dimensional representation of one. There can be an enormous difference between looking at a course routing on a routing plan (a piece of paper) and then going and playing the course!
In a very real sense the two may not relate to you well at all! It works very much the other way too. How many times have you played a particular course and then looked at the routing plan for the first time and said to yourself; "My God is that what the golf course (routing) looks like?" And isn't that somewhat amazing because you'd just walked all over the golf course. That very much happened to me after playing NGLA and also Pacific Dunes! I couldn't believe that the routing looked (from above or on paper) like the progressions that I'd just played! Isn't that amazing, and even on relatively open sites! It's amazing to me!
But as was said on your other thread about routing, you really don't play a routing! You play the golf holes in a routing. On that I would somewhat disgree with what Matt said. In this way it is very much true that you could have the exact same golf holes on a course and if you arranged them differently (the routing) you could have an enormous variation between a good routing and a bad one! This would be with the exact same holes, no less, just arranged differently!
This is why doing a routing can be so complex really. It isn't just the holes (no matter how potential they may individually be) but how they string together and this has everything to do with some necessities of balance and variety of golf! In this way the process really is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with one overriding difference! In the golf routing jigsaw puzzle you can't pick the pieces up and fit them together the way you can in doing an actual jigsaw puzzle! Only if it was so! You just have to keep changing the arrangements of what the land is giving you as the whole thing applies to balance and variety and the necessities of the game of golf.
Once you have what you think is a good routing which has much to do with some necessary balance and variety requirments of golf then the features of the holes come into play and how you arrange them (make them, place them, find them, choose those arrangements) is very much of a separate process.
If you happen to have a property where you find yourself what you know is a great routing and the individual landforms (the holes) that you strung together have natural elements all over them that fit in beautifully with the necessary balance and variety requirments of golf, then you have yourself one helluva great piece of property for golf!!
Use it as is and don't change it except where absolutely necessary for some reason. I can't imagine that happens often though. Maybe at Sand Hills or even Merion or Pine Valley, but I bet all those designers had to be out there for a long time figuring out how to string all that good stuff together into the necessary requirments for the game.
Many times the old designer (since they couldn't move things that well) probably said; "Aw the hell with it, I can't rearrange this any better so let's just give them some quirk!! Routing quirk or actual hole quirk!! And somehow that became acceptable and even cool--and thank God it did!
I do love Coore's description of routing as "taking a golf walk"! The "walk" part is basically the routing (landform and hole landform arrangements) always with those balance and variety things in the back of your mind! The "golf" part of the "golf walk" though is all the other little things you have to do for the necessary requirments of the game and how it should be best played on the individual holes alone.
I may be losing my mind though--one of these days I'm going to go off the deep end! Maybe I already have!