Randy:
I have a picture on my phone of the hole at Ballyneal, from the tee. Don't know how to post it here but I will email it to you.
As for my comment about #6 at Riviera, I guarantee you there are places on that green where the intervention of the bunker means you can't get a putt within the leather. I suspect Thomas's original green was larger at the back so that you could use the slope to steer around the bunker and get closer than today, but still, not always within the leather.
So ... are you going to tell me we should blow that one up, and I should never build a green like that?
There's the same problem with the Road Hole at St. Andrews. You're on the front left corner of the green and the hole is back left, with the Road bunker intervening? Nope, you can't get a putt inside the leather. You gonna blow that one up, too?
So there are two great and famous holes where your rule of thumb does not apply, and you should really think about why it should apply anywhere else.
When I asked Pete Dye what I should do on my overseas trip, this is exactly what he told me to do ... become familiar with all of the best holes, and show people that nothing I was doing was more severe than those.
There is a great article by Ron Whitten in this month's GOLF DIGEST about Mr. Dye's legacy. He spent a lot of time talking to Alice, with Pete right in the room, but really unable to answer now. Luckily Alice can still tell it like it is. There are a bunch of quotes from her but I thought Ron saved the best ones for last:
"The main thing about Pete's career was that he had courage to do what nobody else would do. He went way out on a limb with every golf course he built. And the next one wasn't anything like the course he'd just built.
Every single green he built was a fresh idea. He never went to a drawer and pulled out a drawing, because we don't have any drawings of his greens. Every green came from his head, a new idea on that particular spot. He's done all the greens on all his courses."
That's not quite true; I did the first versions of a couple of greens with Pete's name on them, and others did, too, but they weren't good to go until Pete (and Alice!) approved of them. Mrs. Dye also pointed out that one of Pete's strengths was that "he never had any pride ... he just wanted to build golf courses like a kid wanting to play with clay." He was able to try out new ideas, and let other people suggest ideas, but he wasn't afraid to give them up [usually while they were still in the dirt] if they really didn't work.
That's the way I was taught, and I have done my best to hold myself to the same standard. It's not always easy to pull it off. Probably more difficult for you because you're in such a small market; if a few people are vocal about not liking something, there aren't plenty of other golfers to take their spots on the tee sheet. But it really helps if you can talk them down based on examples of great courses!