Ran, your's is a perfectly legitimate question and one that has long concerned me, not just in my own duties as a "critic," but also concerning panelists who play and pass judgment on courses for magazine surveys. I have long urged Golf Digest panelists to play a course more than once or at the very least, walk (or ride) the course a second time, without clubs, to observe things not noticed while playing. Yes, this is still a terribly superficial examination of a project that an architect (and many others) spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours upon, BUT, architects aren't designing for us critics. They are (or should be) designing for patrons who pay and play. How many rounds should they have to play before they pass judgment on the course? One, two, ten?
Okay, most customers are looking at a course with a much less trained eye than critics, and are looking for a lot different things . . . nice lies, no OBs, no deep grass, no lost balls, etc. My point is, for both critics and paying customers, judgments are arrived after a single round, good, bad or indifferent. Everything is based on first impressions, which is why most architects these days engage in such spectacular special effects aimed at making those first impressions.
As somebody who makes a living more or less as a critic, I can honestly say that my bosses won't wait while I spend 100 hours trying to absorb every nuance of Oak Hill or Whistling Straits before I write an article about it. So you do the best you can with what time you can devote to each study. You do make a solid point with me, however, that I should bee more open with readers about how much or how little time I spent on a particular course before writing about it. I detest being asked to write about a course that I have never played, but I've done it. (Case in point: Augusta National. I've walked the thing a dozen times, but have yet had the opportunity to tee it up there. Does that disqualify me from writing about it? Not at all. As Agatha Christie once said, you don't have to commit murder to write intelligently about it.
For the record, regarding The Quarry at Giants Ridge (my web site course review this week), I toured the raw site with Brauer a couple of years back, photographed it one evening and the next morning a couple of weeks back, and played it twice, once in a dreaded scramble, the second time with Jeff Brauer and his ball-bashing PGA Champion-in-the-making 15 year old son. I'm probably luckier than most in that I got to pick Brauer's brain about certain holes, shots, etc. Would more rounds improve my perspective of the course. Probably, especially since I was so enthusiastic in my review. But waiting to get back there again, and writing about it in December, does no one any good. So we make do with the time we have.
I commend you on forcing us to think about our own actions. Having thought about it, I think most of us feel pretty comfortable with what we're doing.
P.S. I only wish more architects really spent as much time on sites as you think they do. Associates, project architects, project engineers, construction superintendents, yes. Real architects? Alas, no. Brauer, however, told me he would show me his hotel receipts to prove he spent all 100 plus days on the site he says he spent. He didn't need to I think it showed in the final product.