BC,
Good call on Cherry Hills 2014 hosting - I too don't really care whether it's a "canonical" major or not, I just like to watch the top echelon of players (in Woods' case, the "toppest") tackle the classic courses (even in their current iterations) on a historical, comparative basis. It's just a little more fraught with history when its a major.
I don't know much about Cherry Hills the course, but the venue has its niche in history, including a watershed tournament in 1960 that saw Nicklaus' annunciation by a sunsetting Hogan , Palmer's only US Open and maybe his peak.
I've lost perspective (and some interest) in the matter of what 7400 yards at mile-high altitude means...325-375 yard drives from 2/3rds of the field? If so, it makes the 430 - 550 yard holes kinda unintersting and the 200+ one-shotters, a bit of a yawner too. I mean they might hit 6 irons on a 225 yard par 3.
In that vein, PM's poses a good rhetorical question. We don't want it to be entirely a 70 yard pitch and who holes the most 9 footers and in...though we do like that aspect sprinkled into the spectated round.
Even in conceding the many reasons why courses lose their ability to provoke the elite class to their best, there's still a vein in me that wishes there was an alternate form of competition - like a time trial, players go out alone with a marker, on the slew of classic courses not on steroids (The country Club - Composite, Inverness, NGLA, Canterbury, WFE, etc) and see how low they can go. There's still a part of me that would like to see scoring like the 4:00 mile...going lower.
Thinking about PM's original question...
Looking at Torrey, Bay Hill, Muirfield Village, Augusta National, Firestone, Medinah...initially I see him preferring a course:
a. that rewards brawn (eg. permits recoveries to the green complex itself, and the bigger the miss isn't proportionately worse the result)
b. that has large greens
cheers
vk