Hello,
I'm unclear as to the intended premise of this...for, in a vacuum, I could be delighted with the good flight and hit required to make something go a max of 150 bonnie yards... but on an existing course of 5500 + yards, it would be unsatisfying...is that what you're asking...?
Perhaps you mean, "now having acclimated to a longer hit (of 250-300 yards) could you be satisfied with a max 150, aesthetically?" If that is the case, it then still goes back to function; and "yes," if the function of (a proportionately shortened course containing) 150-400 yard two and three shot holes, credits a straight 150 yard drive ahead for the achievement of "4"....in that proportional case, I would get as much aesthetic fun from doing my 125-150 yard drives as I do from my 230-255 drives now.
I had the odd fortune of having extensive experience with the Cayman ball (my friend owned that particular manufacturing patent for a time, and had hundreds of them once) which goes about 37-50% of the standards of 1995-2005 "distances..." THAT ball was enjoyable to hit, watch fly, try and control and knock around and on the handful of occasions I took some to a Par 3/Executive course, it was almost a reboot of the game for me...it made these little municipal courses (Stratford, CT's Short Beach and Fairfield's Pine Creek, both near the water) like the Ailsa course...
That short ball was great; it had the right properties of spin and movement and rewarded clean hits and good swings, and didn't foozle out unduly on the poor ones... the only critique was that it didn't have quite the reliable feel for short game nips and pitches and only putted satisfyingly on fast surfaces...the slower ones (7.8 and below) interacted capriciously with one's intended line. I would think that further advances in technology in 35 years could revisit the problem without destroying the otherwise-good of that ball.
I love this subject but I can't boil down any further my conclusions on the topic of the ball. My fact of the matter is there ought to be a shorter tournament ball played for the championships of the leading national and international sanction organizations and the other 98.5% of us can play any rocket ball we want...states, counties, regions and individual clubs can all decide what they want to do for themselves, whether to use the tournament ball or a anything including a Robinhood if they like. the manufacturers still get to hawk what they want to hawk to the buying public, and now they have a second specialty market where they share the same manufacture specs and proceeds. Who knows, it might become a cache market for "Tournament" golf balls and "Unlimited" golf balls, which do you agree to play today.
If the 1% of tours, and golf associations and prize-competitions used a ball whose driver distance goes an average of 85% of what it does now...(say 290 yards...) then the courses need not be morphed to accommodate a tournament every 10-20 years...
And with money, it's no great trick to set up a course for elite play, for we know exactly what it takes to produce a significant demand on the elite 1.5% class of golfers. What IS a great trick is how to make the other 98.5 % provoked to amusement by that same course, which contains values of architecture we would have preserved, and not have destroyed for this concept of "I kill it like the pros do."
It seems so obvious to me, that the burden of this evolution... if it is to be checked for the good of preserving nuanced architectural values and a link to the game's past...must fall on the leading competitive golfers and their organizations to accept such a ball and for their sponsoring manufacturers to accept this slight alteration of the market, which, who knows, might give rise to a legitimate second tier market of product for them to build upon...like the tri markets of aluminum, composite and wood for baseball bats.
cheers
vk