A diligent person should be able to figure out the return on ambience score of specific amenities such as those, Jeff. You may laugh but a distinctive dish could count for a lot. Many raters rave about things like the turtle soup at Pine Valley, so this is read.
The more I think about it, the more easily I think it could be for a course to hack its scores, particularly in the categories of resistance to scoring, aesthetics, memorability and ambience. There must be consultants out there running these numbers. I could see a lot of courses paying up for secret, easy hacks to the Golf Digest system. A lot of these hacks would work on Golf and Golfweek raters, too. You can't fight being human.
Aesthetics and memorability: we haven't discussed how to hack those but we will starting now. Given the large and growing body of research on memory, I bet people would be shocked how easy it is to manipulate raters without actually changing the course proper. I can see visual cues and other devices, even things like really cool yardage books, working like magic.
On to aesthetics. Plainfield and Inverness are two of the ugliest courses in the 100 Greatest. Who's played either? What are some easy hacks?
Looking at the Plainfield pics in Ran's review, a difficult, expensive hack -- but one that could really pay off -- is making the bunkers look lacy and frilly edged. If that puts a half-point pop in the aesthetics score, then Plainfield makes a move from the 72nd Greatest course in America to 60th, right above Canyata. And that's just off aesthetics. Almost certainly there's an additional pop in memorability -- if they find a half-point there too then the course is knocking on the door of the Greatest 50. Could also see benefits in resistance to scoring and / or shot values: wouldn't surprise me if raters fell into believing those new, frilly bunkers were harder.