A few points in response to Forrest's original post, which asks some very fair questions.
1. I wasn't old enough in the 1980s (or alive earlier) to fairly comment on golf architecture media then, but I remember it well in the 90s and 2000s. I still have tons of promotional brochures and magazines from that time period in a box in my office. When I look at those, it doesn't feel totally fair to me to imply that it's brand new trend for the current media to be pushing just "one style or else" when all those pamphlets contain the same interchangeable buzzwords with each other, and the courses largely look the same as each other in the pictures. It felt like rinse-and-repeat promotion, even more than today (which has some preferences but preferences that run counter to previous decades preferences. Should they just be continuing on praising that same type of work as before? That provides even less diversity of opinion when viewed in a decades-long context).
2. The "feeling" of what media currently promotes (regardless of what that means to you) and the newer courses they highlight is still highly disproportionate to the reality of golf architecture as a whole. Even if two hundred wide-fairwayed, frilly-edge bunkered, browned-out courses were to open in the next year, there would still be 10,000 other courses out there that are badly designed, boring, wasteful, or missed opportunities. A part of the reason some of recent media may feel repetitive in what they promote is that it is still on the whole rare for most golfers to have ready access to that type of golf.
3. These implied media outlets promote everything from the most scruffy munis to highly polished new work or renovation work. They cover new designs, ancient links courses, the Golden Age (which is the most diverse period of golf design itself), and even the more creative stuff from the so-called Dark Ages. It's not entirely fair to pigeon-hole their coverage into one sub-niche. On top of that, more golfers than ever before have some semblance of what golf architecture even is. Isn't that a good thing?
4. As one of the "young designers," I don't naturally aim to copy others styles or ideals. I like what I like, and I also want to be as original as I can be. I don't want to ever get creatively "bored" or stuck to routines or patterns, instead trying to think of ways to make some new feature unique (if you are being honest with yourself, this is very hard to achieve at this stage of golf design). I also can't let that creative desire get me in trouble and try to impose something that doesn't feel right to a particular site. The most important thing still for every site is to respond to its features, its physical context, and its regional typologies. Sometimes that may visually or strategically overlap with more famous designers before me. But making an effort to avoid that point isn't as important as adhering to the one preceding it.
5. The Victoria's Secret analogy may be a bit dated. Has anyone seen their mailing ads and such lately? I wonder too if the inference of "what the current design trend happens to be" is also a bit dated, especially with the newest stuff coming out and what is currently under construction. The cosmetics of design have been trending differently for a few years now, and I even wrote about that on my
own site 4 years ago while indirectly stating a desire to do something creatively different.