Tom — We'll invite you to play No. 17 at Lake of the Pines in a few years and then you can come back and possibly answer this question.
The par-6 at Lake Chabot seems to spark interest, and I have never heard anyone say it was a terrible hole. The entire course is quirky, to say the least. The comment here is that their par-6 is "good".
Here is an excerpt from Routing the Golf Course in which I attempted (c 2001) to sum up par-6s...I think the main take-a-way is that golf before the "modern" game knew no "par" standard "length" or for that matter, "courses". Play from the beginning to the early 1800s was simply "where players wanted to roam and plan with little formality at all."
Par 6s are an oddity, but they are for real. In the day of long, long hitting, holes with enough length to be classified as par 6s might have been an interesting trend. However, it might be pointed out that adding par is by no means a defense against hitting length. In reality, it is the other way around; perhaps par might be lessened and length increased. Back to the par-6. The best reasons to create a par 6 are to take advantage of a tremendous landform and to appropriately link holes in a routing so that the course makes sense. It might be time to revisit the concept of primitive golf courses where, as you’ll recall, there were no pars, no yardage plaques, and no slope ratings. There was a starting point and an ending point, and even these were informal at best. On occasion play could take hours, it has been surmised, to negotiate a single hole. There, perhaps that makes the par 6 easier to digest.