Rick,
I've been thinking about this for almost 24 hrs. now since I first read your post, and I think it is a great question.
I read something years ago (maybe by Dick Coop?) that said that the attraction of golf is the "intermittent reinforcement" that it offers. If it was much harder, nobody would play, and if it was much easier, it wouldn't pose a challenge. The manifestation of this is those shots that even the worst duffer hits where, with no discernable reason, the ball is an airborne thing of beauty and a Walter Mitty moment ensues. There are just enough to bring us back. And back. And back.
What part the difficulty of the course plays in this is hard to say, but if we take the same psychological principles, the course has to be difficult enough to be challenging, but not so difficult that the fun leaves the game. It seems to me that a great deal of the slow, meandering thrust of this website is the need to return to courses that actually achieve this, with the added benefit that they are cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, and so forth.
We've discussed bunkerless courses, for instance. While this could be done, I'm not sure that there is a point to it. It may be that at least some bunkers play into the equation of intermittent reinforcement, by giving us the chance for heroic recovery from seeming disaster. Maybe what so many in this discussion group holds dear in what a golf course should be is the physical manifestation of the same joy and attraction that seeing the ball take flight gives us psychologically.
Maybe it isn't so much that the game should BE easier, but that it should SEEM easier, and this is what makes great golf course architecture, as so many observed at Cuscowilla last month.