Brent, my likely ill-informed responses to your thoughts below:
What principle is it that says the Rules of Golf are supposed to encourage you to play from water hazards?
The principle that the rules should be designed to encourage you to play the ball as it lies, rather than taking a penalty stroke. Sure, that principle isn't absolute -- one could strongly discourage taking an unplayable lie if one made the penalty two strokes rather than one, for example, but the unfairness of such a rule would outweigh the benefit. But it seems like, all else equal, most of us would rather see people hitting the ball where they find it rather than taking a penalty and dropping it somewhere else.
If that's the purpose of the Rules then you ought to be able to ground your club, clear away everything that might affect your swing, hell you might as well drain the swamp while you're at it.
Not if the overarching principle is "you should be able to play the ball as you find it, but not improve your lie or swing." I recognize that it's hard to come up with a rule to implement that principle (and that some might disagree with the principle itself), but there's a clear line between doing everything Brent talks about and accidentally moving something
while trying to hit the golf ball.
You guys amaze me. It's a bad thing to let players ground their clubs in a bunker but a water hazard shouldn't put any restrictions on the player's ability to play a normal shot. Maybe that's just one more example of this site's fixation on sand bunkers as the be-all and end-all of golf course design.
No hypocrisy here. I would have been on the other side of the bunker argument too, and I imagine that I'm in the distinct minority on this rule.