"What golfers want should have zero bearing on what they get."
All good for you to say unless you own a golf course.
If your competitor down the road is maintained lush and wet so Joe Bogey's 5 iron approaches splat down and stay put, Joe Bogey will play there instead of your place. Even if your greens putt much better, he would much rather stake that 5 iron than admire the perfect roll on his 40' birdie putt at your place.
While I think Adam's statement is a bit ridiculous (talk about the opposite of "the customer is always right!") I don't believe your assertion either. I certainly hear higher handicap golfers complain about F&F conditions on the greens because their approaches won't hold well, but complaints about the greens being too slow and/or too bumpy/chewed up greatly dominate them.
Given a choice between not having their approaches hold and putting over a sea of ball marks and spike marks, I think the vast majority would choose the former. But amazingly I think many golfers don't think about the correlation between receptive greens and greens with lots of ugly ball marks.
Maybe they expect the maintenance staff ought to be able to do something about them -- after all, when the pros play a wet course where every shot leaves a big hole, the greens are still beautiful on TV. But they don't understand that's because those courses haven't received anything like the play their course does in the week or two prior to the event, and that pros are much better than regular golfers at fixing their ball marks. I wonder if those courses giving players those special repair tools that force people to fix marks correctly (instead of pulling up on the roots like 98% of golfers do, if they bother to fix the mark at all) have seen improved greens?
I do think some people are being a bit unfair to Steve here, I do believe he has a valid point that some golfers prefer slow and lush conditions. I happen to think they are wrong to want that but many of them have rarely experienced anything else so it is just what they are used to and have designed their game around. If you hardly ever play F&F conditions, you will not learn the ground game, or about thinking about approach angles, so everything just seems unfair as they try to hit the same high shots they normally do. Just like some golfers will never play on a windy day because they do not appreciate the challenge or understand how to play the shots demanded of the golfer in such conditions. I do think that if they realized the benefits of F&F environmentally, cost-wise, turf health wise and green trueness/appearance wise they might be willing to live with what they see as the "negatives" of F&F and over time many would become fans of F&F. But if a super at a course that's been S&L for years in a climate that would permit F&F decided to go F&F, I think its likely he'd have a hard time getting full member acceptance without selling them on it first. For a public course its different, you can just do it, and if the cost savings in lower maintenance costs outweighs plus new play from people who like F&F outweighs the revenue loss from people who prefer S&L, you are fine.