Kyle,
So would you consider the fairway bunkering under, let's say, a typical modern Tour event presentation to be strategic in the most player-specific sense of the word?
For a Tour player who drives the ball to 175 yards from the green, he'd certainly rather be on the fairway than in a large bunker with perfectly groomed sand. But he will generally play a shot from the sand to the green and have a good chance of success. So his player-specific strategy is going to consider the fairway as most desirable, the groomed bunker as making birdie much more difficult but still not taking par out of play and the rough a few yards from the bunker to be a half-shot or more penalty. He can take all of these estimates into account when trying to decide whether to play away from the bunker vs. running a chance of being in it.
For myself, driving into a fairway bunker 175 yards from the green is a different question. Being in fairway that far out I'm still not likely to make birdie but par ought to be very doable. From the bunker I am 100% totally playing for bogey with a one-putt par of some kind being a faint hope. And from any sort of deep rough near the bunker I'm hacking out and not even certain to attain that bogey.
So deploying that bunker "strategically" in terms of the overall shape and length of the hole, the contours and receptiveness of the green and the greenside bunkering is hard to predict comprehensively for a range of players encompassing a 17-handicapper, a good amateur player and a Tour professional.
Now let's bring in a herd of buffalo to trample the bunker, remove the rakes, forbid players from smoothing it after play and basically turn it into a no-go zone everyone from me to Tiger Woods will avoid at all costs. It the functional equivalent of a small water hazard. To my mind you've turned the interesting strategic ramifications of a player's skill at hitting fairway bunker shots into a simple penal feature. Yes you could still provide "strategy" by placing it to one side of a narrow fairway. But not much differently than having water or OB there.
So that, to me, seems the fundamental question. Do we want bunker hazards to be somewhere in the list of disastrous places to avoid hitting the ball (along with knee deep rough, water hazards, OB and miscellaneous desert/gorse/rock type nightmares) or do we want bunkers to be a discrete type of feature that is, if not innately "strategic", then "strategic" in a complex way because of the special technique that can be developed to minimize the cost of bunkering a shot? And I'd say the maximum interest is produced by raking and maintaining them so that skill can be brought to be bear AND using them with width to produce more different fractions of a stroke advantage to the player's choices (and again, those fractions of a stroke depending on the player's skill, ball flight and normal shot shape).