Chris,
So many questions! No one really knows if we baby boomers or the next generations will act like our parents acted. We have more recreations options, we will likely be poorer in retirment as boomers, our kids may have less wealth (although I doubt that long term - hey, no one thought our generation was worth a crap when we were teens, either!), but they will sure have slightly different values. IF we react like our parents, golf should get slightly stronger as the boomers age and retire, but golf will really need to be affordable in most cases.
I don't think Tiger had as big an effect on the construction boom as an NGF study that showed we needed a cousre a day for ten years (which boosted construction from 250 a year way past 365 to 400-500 a few years) in convincing develpers to build new courses. Add in a well funded real estate trust that was paying top dollar to buy courses in the late 90's, which raised the price of buying so high it was cheaper to build, and the great economy of that period which temporarily filled the courses. I kind of knew it was a bubble when the golf mags were posting stock quotes for golf companies each month, kind of like JP Morgan getting out of the market when a shoe shine boy gave him a stock tip!
The trend to making more courses public has been going on for 50 years. It won't stop.
I haven't seen the latest stats, but the courses going under recently tended to be the mom and pop rural courses. I don't think its cost totally, its location, location, location. Probably the next biggest group was courses near the inner city that could recently make their owners more money being sold as real estate than as golf. Upscale courses probably won't go out of business - they will get sold at a loss/great price and reposition themselves as mid level courses. (Or as standards rise, the mid level will come up to where they are) But, those trends aren't new either. Only in a great economy will most golfers pay for service, flower beds, perfect maintenance, etc. (except for perhaps a select few courses) For most, it will always be price and convenience.
The trend to closing has slowed down this year. The peak was the last two years. I forget the exact numbers but it was about 75 courses last year and over 100 the year before. Not really that many out of 16,000 golf courses, really less than 0.5-0.75%.
I like to think golf has been going strong since 1450 or so and its fundamentals are strong, so it will keep going. Hopefully, this is a bump in the road, but like you, I sense it will also cause a paradigm shift that many here would like - lower cost, less perfect maintenance, etc. The only thing people won't like is that the architecture at most places will suffer a bit, but probably not as badly as it did in the 30's and 70's oil crisis - people are just too aware of the gca now to gut a course completely in the name of maintenance and standards have gone up, since golfers will remember what it was like to have a nicely designed upscale course.
As always, my crystal ball could be cloudy.