Geoff:
I'm going to be kind and suggest that while companies in Carlsbad may believe it's the burden of courses to accommodate what you call "changes in the sport", they are smart enough not to state it explicitly.
Doing so would expose the obvious (at least to me) flaw in the whole golf technology arms race.
Golf is a game that depends on a BALANCE between player skills, the equipment deployed and the configuration of the playing field. In a sensible world, that balance would be achieved at the lowest possible cost.
If we gave a golfer a ball he could hit 400 yards, nobody would be foolish enough to think this was an “improvement”. Likewise, if we suggested courses ought to be 10,000 yards to accommodate “technology improvements”, most human beings with a reasonable IQ would see the flaw in such reasoning.
So, the Carlsbad boys are smart enough to pursue gradual, incremental change and obscure the cost it imposes on golfers.
We need to expose the long term damage they are doing to the game, how the emphasis on absolute rather than relative distance only makes playing the game more expensive.
Tournament golf doesn’t need all this new technology; the whole point is to identify different levels of playing skills. Casual golf doesn’t need new technology either: people want to play more not pay more.