Tom,
I've had an architect whose work often gets panned here (deservedly so) refer to GCA (and Max's) as "Dickhead.com" - snarling that we're a bunch of insufferable, pseudo-intellectual, wannabe designers who spend their time kissing your ass and shouting down any opinion that deviates from the collective "group think."
Look, you and I have been friends a long time and there is no doubt some posters in the Treehouse find your presence a little intimidating, but where else in the golf world can you get instantaneous access to the thoughts of a top-flight architect without paying for it? Add in Mike Young, Brauer, Neal and the rest of the architects - plus the gaggle of golf writers, raters and industry professionals like Jim Kennedy and there are plenty of guys with enough street cred to go toe-to-toe with you or anybody else.
When I first met you years ago, people mistook your shyness in person for standoffishness - I am not sure if that is a word, but let's go with it. You generally did not make a lot of conversation and thus had an aura of mystery; the mad-scientist genius insane enough to have written a book criticizing the work of the biggest swinging dicks in the industry.
Now that you've been out in circulation for a few years - and are 10x more communicative - my guess would be that 75% of the posters on this board are honest about your work. The 25% who aren't keep their opinions to themselves largely (IMNSHO) because they have a small stool in the corner of the faculty lounge and don't have the chops to offer their opinions to the provost. Ever notice that Ran's write-ups don't get much critique from the Treehouse hoi polloi?
The other element - since honesty is the theme of the thread - is that although I can personally nitpick individual holes or features on your designs, the vast majority of what you (and the gang who got their start in your nest) create is outstanding. Please, I am not the first person to tell you that. The underlying philosophy and design principles at Renaissance, Hanse Designs, DeVries Design and whatever Jim Urbina calls himself appeal to most of us because they are not formulaic and invariably interesting and creative.
Am I slurping Tom Doak here because we came to be friends? Fuck no, I am just writing the truth. If you put 500 golf architecture intellectuals into a closet - most of whom love and appreciate the minimalist roots of the ground game - there is bound to be a common thread of appreciation. You don't read a lot of harsh critiques of Bill and Ben's work here, yet neither of them have ever climbed into the Treehouse aside from a feature interview. Why? Because they don't churn out a bunch of cookie-cutter crap like Rees or indulgent obstacle courses like Jack.
The ass-rip on Fazio is the only hole in my thesis - mostly because I think his work is terrific within the context of his philosophy. That does not mean I agree with many things his firm does, but I've never walked off a Tom Fazio track thinking I wasted a perfectly good day on a pile of shit. The same cannot be said of many others.
In some ways, there are a handful of guys here who don't get enough love. Todd Eckenrode and David Kidd are damn good, but it is like they do not exist. I have never figured out why my friend John Harbottle never got his due from us critics. You both started with Pete and Alice and oddly, I see more Dye influence in his designs then in yours. Maybe it was his membership in the ASGCA; the Tartan jacket is a symbol of the anti-Christ to a few on this board.
I can point out that Bill and Ben have a penchant for awkward, overly long, uphill par-5s (Cuscowilla, B-Trails), that DeVries sometimes goes off the deep end with putting surface contours (#3 at Meadow, #13 at Green Hills) or that sometimes you design a hole that makes no sense (#10 at Apache) or even chicken out a little bit (#7 at GC or #10 at Old Mac). But taken as a body of work, those tiny little gripes are less than mouse nuts - especially compared to catastrophic failures by big names like Stone Harbor or that clumsy mess at Atlantic.