Ed - I'm stealing from myself from another thread, to say that I think we're crazy in this sense only: in that we tend to focus on and praise individual architectural features, as if those features were -- in and of themselves -- important and determinative (of quality, of fun, of interest). I'd suggest that this focus on features (by architects and afficianados alike) has probably caused and produced more bad and copy-cat architecture than it has good. (On top of that, the need for new courses to 'open' strong; the bi-weeekly rankings, the top 100 lists; the huge money involved in building and promoting and playing new courses; the glossy photos -- all of these factors further encourage architects and golfers alike to focus on and praise the features in and of themselves.) But I think no one really/actually experiences those features in that way, but instead experiences and enjoys architecture in terms of its effects and affects, in a kind of dialetic in which an individual golfer with certain skills interacts with architectural features on a given day under fluid meteorological and maintenance conditions and with each element (the architectural elements being only one of them) experienced as affects/effects -- as if all around us as it were, on the periphery as oppossed to directly in front of us. In short: as long as we keep staring at architecture like prehistoric cavemen first stared at the first fire, I'd say, yes, we're a little crazy.
Peter