Lots of things going on here.
Yes, the major issue with way forward tees is 'dead' walking, having to schlep a couple of hundred yards just to get to your tee. Ally is right about positioning of greens close to the most played tees, not the back ones, but I would make two observations, firstly this seems obvious but you would be amazed how often courses are laid out in a linear fashion and you have to walk past three sets of tees to get to yours, and secondly 99.9 per cent of the time we're talking about building new forward tees on existing courses, not building new courses. Here, the routing is fixed. The only remedy, unfortunately, is carts.
Women golfers, like men golfers, are not a single species. There are women who hit the ball less than 100 yards with their best drive and there are those that can really belt it. One set of 'ladies' tees is no solution, just as one set of 'men's' tees isn't. The only answer is to completely remove sex from tee boxes (unarguably a good thing surely?
). If you have a number of sets of tees, you can play from the ones that best suit your game, whatever chromosomes you have. It makes just as little sense forcing a 20 year old single figure handicap athletic young woman to play from 4,000 yard tees as it does forcing an 80 year old guy to play from 6,500.
Dai in principle your idea of splitting courses into a men's nine and a ladies' nine makes sense, but in practice how on earth are you going to do it? Fine, if your course happens to have one nine that is considerably longer than the other. But this is just another example of the old 'I wouldn't start from here' story. We have courses; we aren't about to totally redesign them.
IMO the absolute ideal solution is to have a golf course that is designed to be playable by everyone from basically the same place. I once posted a thread on here saying how would course design differ if we had the old rules of golf that you had to tee your ball up within a certain distance of the hole (or at least, everyone had to tee it up in the same area), and I remember Tom D saying that this is one of the lessons of St Andrews. You'd have to abandon the idea of landing areas, and you'd have to get your mind around 'par' being very different for golfers of differing ability.