Jim - yours is a good question, and a timely one given that the scores were shot on a C&C course. It strikes me that, when we reference the best players in the world, we most often talk about/mean that they hit the ball a long way. We rarely seem to mention that they know their own games very well, and that they "play the architecture" in relation to their games very smartly indeed. From where I sit, one of the key reasons we get -30 scores, especially on a wide and strategic golf course with big, cool greens, is that golfers like Jordan Speith understand better than most the best lines of play and the best angles of approach and the best options/choices and the best green/green-side misses for their own games, and can execute better and more consistently than anyone in the world that game plan, shot after shot, hole after hole, round after round. So: to your question: why is there so much hand-wringing (and I've done more than my share) about low scores when a) the alternative seems to be the Merion set-up, which to me was a no-where-land course, neither fish nor fowl, and b) these low scores are and can be shot on a course (and would be shot on many/most of the great Top 10 modern courses built in the last 20 years) that provide for the rest of the golfing world exactly the challenges and fun and interest and beauty we all (rightly) praise and cherish? I wonder sometimes if it isn't simply a few of the deadly sins that we're guilty of and that drives said hand-wringing, i.e. pride, envy, sloth, and covetousness.
Peter