Bryan - I agree the rye is very well conditioned for what it is; it just doesn't belong on a links. The turf on greens and surrounds is lovely, firm, tight, just as it should be. But the fairways, or at least the majority of them that have been overseeded, are simply not appropriate for a links course. You might well be right that a fair proportion of golfers would come away feeling it was perfectly conditioned, but you and I know it's not.
The other thing about the rye is that its visual effect accentuates one of my complaints about the course, which is that the fairway shaping is rather gentle, with mainly long, flowing contours, while around many greens there are much more severe undulations. It's visually jarring - to the extent that one golf architect said to me 'it's almost as though they used different shapers for fairways and green surrounds', and it also reduces the practicality of playing a run-up shot. Take the fifth hole - fairway fairly gentle, green elevated, foregreen hugely contoured. You'd be nuts to try and run the ball through those undulations. The seventh is the same, as is the twelfth.
The course has grown on me. I played it in a southerly breeze, rather than the nor'easter we had last summer, and that seemed to help the course. Certainly the tenth hole plays far better downwind than up. The split fairway is still completely pointless, but you can knock your drive past the really narrow bit, and there's a chance to play a heroic second over the corner of the dune and onto the green (the greensite has always been lovely). I also thought the seventh was better downwind - one member of my group was through the back with a three wood, and generally I felt the hole more interesting with the drive the green option being on.
The flipside is that 1-4, plus 16-18 are brutes into any kind of wind. There are still far too many far too elevated tees, which accentuates the effect of the wind and ruins the visual scale of the course (they do give some amazing views mind).
I was told in some detail the sequence of events that led to the mass overseeding with rye, and about the plan to reduce/eliminate it. They believe that in two years time they will have a properly fescue dominated sward. I hope so.