My wife has an idiot friend who mostly hates everything. Among the things included in this list are fast-casual restaurants that let you create your own item with a combination of their ingredients, like Chipotle or Blaze Fast-Fired Pizza or even Jimmy John's.
The reason she hates those types of places is because of her total lack of restraint. When faced with a menu that allows her to top her own food item with her chosen combination of several dozen potential toppings, she is unable to forego any of the toppings she enjoys, even if they don't fit together. As a result, she'll slap together some concoction like a pizza topped with pepperoni, mushrooms, roasted garlic, spinach, pineapple, olives, peppers, onions, barbecue chicken, buffalo chicken, feta cheese, extra spicy sauce, white cream sauce, arugula, pesto, bananas, corn, tortilla chips, and jalapeno peppers. When she then takes a bite and gets hit with a flood of clashing flavors, she blames the restaurant instead of blaming her unrestrained order.
The 18th at Whistling Straits is a lot like that to me. When I first played it I knew it was tough, and I knew it had features I liked such as an angled tee shot, a large green with substantial contours, a ravine, huge bunkers, alternate fairways, a place for shorter hitters to lay up, beautiful views, and a fair amount of elasticity with the ability to play from different tees or to different pin positions. And yet, it didn't immediately appeal to me. The more that I study it, the more I realize that it's the hypothetical pizza above - a bunch of tasty toppings that don't relate to each other.
The tee shot is really too long for the "alternate fairway" on the left to come into play, and a hypothetical risky drive to that small target isn't really rewarded with anything. The green may be big and offer plenty of pin positions, but it doesn't have much character and the strategy really doesn't change as the pin moves around. The drive is difficult, but not particularly interesting. The approach is the same. It's a good tournament golf hole for viewers, yes, because lots can go wrong. But it's certainly not strategic, nor do I think it's much fun to play or particularly interesting architecturally. Everyone knows exactly what each player needs to do when the tee goes into the ground. The only question is one of execution.