Jim, that's a great question really and I would have to think about that! What do you feel about that?
It seems to me in the best of strategic circumstances and scenarios that it might be best to give the less good player a little something to think about and maybe give the better player a little more to think about or maybe a lot more to think about! That makes sense to me since the better player should be able to think better as well as execute better so it seems logical that a designer just might want to ratchet things up a bit on the better longer player!
I don't know either if I would call it 'favor catching the better player or the longer hitter'. If you subscribe to Max Behr's extremely cerebral philosophies on this particular subject it really isn't the job of the designer to "catch" or even penalize a golfer--any golfer--even a very good one! It's the designer's job to create a playing field that inspires any golfer and certainly a good one to react to the playing field in such a way so that he uses all his wits, his observations and concentration to avoid being caught! It might appear at first to be the same thing but on reflection I believe it's almost the opposite!
Behr looked at bunkering and hazard features not as a penalizeing mechanism but features that inspired a sense of "freedom" in the golfer to notice and maximizes the choices available to him!
If you think about it this is the reason they talked so much about strategy that's based on choices and options and the better they are and the more of them there are the more interesting, challenging and enjoyable the game will be.
Sure makes sense to me! And always trying to hit the ball down the center of things and design dictated center corridors doesn't really seem to me to maximize those things!
Of course, these center placed features (pots) are not the only way to design, just a very good one, in my opinion. But there are tons of others, diagonals, capes, doglegs with or without trees, humps, bumps, hollows, contours, slopes, water, elevation changes, degrees of blindness, interesting natural features, deceptions, turning the field of view, green styles, orientations etc, etc! There are so many interesting features and ways to use them and ways to mix them all up!
It also seems to me with a clever use of something like smallish pot bunker features inside the fairway lines that you could combine their function where they would be interesting to a long hitter on the drive, for instance, and then double in function as an interesting feature for the shorter hitter on his second shot etc, etc!