Wow--there went an hour of my morning (I'm a slow reader).
Shivas,
I agree with your opinion of the BBC coverage. I LOVE the crane view.
Tom Paul,
I agree with your take that, to paraphrase, the average player will take anything they are given for their course and like it, but then we can't continue to charge them $85 a round for "throw-back" conditions. Ideally in achieving non-lush conditions the cost of maintenance would decrease and the average green fee would follow suit.
Much of the talk on this thread has been about ways to "toughen" up golf courses for the pros when the original question was whether strategy was obsolete to them. Unless I'm reading it wrong the majority opinion seems to be that without changes in maintenance practice there's little chance to make a course more strategic.
As far as maintenance goes, it seems reasonable that firming up the fairways and greens might challenge the pros in more and different ways than they currently are. They would have to factor in bounce, speed, and roll rather than stright distance. Additionally, I agree with Jim Kennedy about green not meaning soft. Yesterday I played at a fine course near Tampa called Lake Jovita that was beautifully green, yet the fairways ran (not like a links, but there was good enough roll there) and the greens were firm and difficult to hold even with substantial spin. Firmness and greenness can co-exist with the right turf and management.
Staying with maintenance for a moment I spoke with Steve Smyers a few weeks ago and he said rather than technology "the lawnmower has changed the game more than anything." He said, after playing a round at Winged Foot, the the perfect, tight lies found in any given "upscale" fairway allows advanced players to spin the ball any which way they want. Maybe an alternative is to not only firm the turf under those fairways but also not cut them so short so as to produce slightly uneven lies.
I don't imagine the pros would love to see that.
Lastly, to address strategy (which in part I take to mean options and decision-making), perhaps the NGLA #17 paradigm is obsolete (this has been discussed here before).
Holes such as NGLA's 17th (because it's the model) reward length with length, so to speak. The player who can hit it farther--in this case a long carry over scrub down the left side of the fairway--is rewarded with the preferred angle into the green. The safe player or the player who cannot execute the long left carry plays shorter and to the right, leaving a longer approach from a less advantageous angle. Double penalty.
Why not reverse the two plays? How about a better angle for the player who has to hit the longer shot? The long player is already rewarded with a shorter club into the green, so why not make the angle more challenging? The long player might even chose to play the shorter drive/longer approach shot under certain conditions to have a better angle. That, to me, is strategy and variability.