This is a very good idea, and as generally quite a similar set of ideas that I lay out
in an essay I wrote last year.
Where my proposal and this set of principals seems to be a different focus on the
purpose of these facilities. I see all of these types of facilities as being the steps on a latter to get people from having no experience with golf, to be full fledged beginners, without actually noticing we were teaching them golf skills. Each of these facilities could be based around a different intensity of the golf swing, starting with a putting stroke, then a chipping stroke, then a 3/4 swing, then a full swing, then a full driver.
I realize that this is Scotland, but in America, I see the scourge of the ever-present driving range, a facility we pretend is for beginners, but is more suited to advanced golfers. This is where we send beginners to do homework before they get to have fun.
The facility that I think is the linchpin to getting folks into golf, that seems to be missing from most of these analyses, is the chipping course.
In this publication, the Bruntsfield Links is packaged with pitch and putt courses, but when I compare it to the pitch and putt that I played growing up, Butler Pitch & Putt in Austin, the two courses couldn't be more different in kind. At Butler, we see a traditional pitch and putt, normal-ish sized greens and distances of 60-100 yards. At the Bruntsfield Links the vast majority of the holes are between 40-60 yards, the greens are absolutely tiny, and there is effectively no reason to hit the ball high in the air. It is more effective to play a chip-and-run shot.
This essay packages a course at these distances, too long for a putter, but too short for a full swing, as park golf. I suppose that's all well and good and I support park golf, but I think that these chipping distances are perfectly suited to actual golf. I've taken many folks who have no experience in golf to both a full-swing pitch and putt, and a chipping-swing course, and far and away these beginners are better able to handle the chip and run approaches to 50 yards, because they're basically using an extended putting stroke.
By starting people with a putting stroke, and slowly but surely increasing the backswing, we can actually get people taking competent full swings without asking them to toil away at the range before having fun. The best part about this system, is that there is there is plenty of room for interesting and entertaining architecture from putting, to chipping, to full swing pitch and putts. When I was in Edinburgh, the advanced players had extremely intense matches at the Bruntsfield links while playing with absolute beginners and everyone had fun.
If there were any place where I think radical change could be made, it would be in creating a standard low-density safety ball for short courses, simply to alleviate some of the safety concerns that our rock hard polybutadiene balls create.