Observer,
Now that I've read everything that has been written beyond your pile of #*$^ post, it seems that you are wrong, again, or smoking crack.
1. We have an expert who was a part of the project saying...
"At Kingsbarns this (Kingsbarns mounds) LOOK(S) RIGHT because Scotlands Golfing Geomorphologist, Robert Price, gave advice. Compare(d) to that on the 16th on the Eden, St Andrews, and you see a POOR, UNIMAGINATIVE 'dune ridge', running both sides of a flat and featureless fairway. (Brian will like this comment). Mark Parsinen was ABSOLUTELY DETERMINED to understand what a LINKS ENVIRONMENT truly looks like (not what we think it looks like) prior to building one."
2. We have a nice picture of the mounds at EDEN in St. Andrew's DISPLAYING, as Mr. Price put it, "a poor, unimaginative 'dune ridge'"
3. Brian Phillips appears to have no opinion of the 'containment mounds' at Eden, per se, but does back Mr. Daley's assertion that the said 'containment mounds', in question, do indeed SUCK.
Quoting Brian Phillips:
"This is the 16th fairway on the Eden course after Mr. Steel was FINISHED (note the disgust?) with IT (won't even acknowledge it as a 'dune ridge'.
No wonder the locals walk off after 9 holes." (ouch)
IMHO, this type of damning evidence is good enough to put to rest this notion that we are biased or "NON-objective" in our thinking about containment mounds, natural vs un-natural, etc.
I don't care if I come across as the a-hole here. We are always talking about the GCA discussion forum being a place to come and learn and talk about stuff, and so on.
If OBSERVER can't understand what I've just put down here there is no hope of OBSERVER ever 'getting it'.
IMHO, Kingsbarns looks very, very much, based on the pictures I've seen (I haven't been there, yet) like an authentic links. "Carved by nature, holes routed "naturally", 118 golf holes waiting to be discovered," pick you own cliche.
Even though this wasn't the case, as Brian's original pictures clearly show (the place was as flat as a pancake), IMHO it is a testament to the AWESOME work of Kyle Phillips and everyone else involved, that Kingsbarns LOOKS like a course that was always there, waiting to be discovered. It doesn't matter if it wasn't, it LOOKS like it, and from what it sounds like, it plays like it. To me there is something to this notion of "golf as it was in the beginning". Sandpines doesn't evoke this same spirit.
I just don't know how else to put it than that. What is interesting to me about the Kingsbarns project is this question that can be derived from our conversation here:
What is more difficult? Creating a great course like Kingsbarns or Whistling Straits (a blank canvas, so to speak)
versus
DISCOVERING a great course like Pac Dunes or Friar's Head.
In one case we must create our 'natural looking golf features', in the other, we strive to not SCREW-UP what is already there for us.
IMHO, the second is more difficult, and it is what separates the good from the best.