Jim - seriously, like Jeff I think you do raise key/relevant points, some of which I hadn't thought of and many of which 'mitigate' the validity of those stats. But if those stats don't mean everything, I do think they mean something.
My feeling is that they mean this:
that there was a tipping point in technology that simply blew apart all the old paradigms. During all the changes over the years, e.g. from hickory to steel, from haskell to balata, from non irrigated fairways to wet ones, from slow greens to fast etc, the distance-accuracy (i.e. power-ball striking) equation stayed basically the same.
Vardon and Hagen and Jones and Saracen and Nelson and Hogan and Snead and Nicklaus and Watson and Norman had to balance distance & accuracy in roughly the same way, and for roughly the same benefits.
And then came the super hot and super forgiving driver faces combined with the low spin (off driver) & high spin (off short irons) golf balls, and we got the tipping point. The 'balance' was gone. And the game changed -- less nuanced, less interesting, less in the spirit that had characterized it for more than a century.
P