Pat,
In spite of your own words, practice (or product, as you call it) does not exist in a vacuum. Truly, in order for design philosophy to manifest itself, there must first be PHILOSOPHY. Yet you consistently deny this fact. You say that “writings and interviews are meaningless.” This is also curious as you have accumulated over 27,300 posts over the years, each one using the written word to support an entirely theoretical position (and unless you have designed and built a golf course of which I am not aware, every bit of these posts represents written theory, not practice). Further, if it fair to say that you have been participating on this site for 10 years, are we to believe that you have written, on average, nearly 7.5 posts per DAY for a decade when you are absolutely positive that the written word is meaningless? If actions speak louder than words, then why have you spent so much time and effort writing? Why aren’t you taking yourself to task and designing golf courses? How can we take your words seriously any longer if you so adamantly refute the validity of the written word in the first place?
What if I were to tell you that MacKenzie’s 9th principle in The Spirit of St. Andrews states “There should be an infinite variety in the strokes required to play the various holes—that is, interesting brassie shots, iron shots, pitch and run up shots.” This is entirely in keeping with a thread you initiated just last week with respect to how using all the clubs in one’s bag is a key to good design. MacKenzie's words expressly serve your own purposes and beliefs. Are you equally as dismissive of his writing in this situation? Are these words still meaningless? Is this theoretical concept invalid?
P.S. – In a different age, you too would likely have been a member of the “flat earth” society. Remember what happened to Galileo when he tried to convince people that the earth revolved around the sun? Prior to this, the best science of the time (i.e. Ptolemy, and others) mathematically proved that the earth was the center of the universe. Everyone believed this; they had no legitimate reason to believe otherwise; the THEORY and PRACTICE of astronomy—as well as the heavy hand of the church—had confirmed what we know now to be a falsity. I suspect that in a similar situation, with similar information at your disposal (ii.e. prior to Galileo and Copernicus), and with your life on the line, even you would have followed suit and accepted the "truth" of a geocentric universe.