Tommy - this wasnt your first time out there, was it?
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the course. Is it better than most new courses in the area? Damn right it is...blows Tierra Whybother entirely off the map...but at the same time I just didn't see all that much there. To me, it seemed to be a course that valued one thing and one thing only - long, straight tee shots. Once you find yourself in the fairway, the big greens (which I thought were mostly unremarkable) were pretty easy to figure out and approach.
One of the things that makes a course like Rustic so much of a challenge is the way that the collars and surrounds actually meld themselves into the putting surfaces, like the fall-off to the right of 12...ANGC looks like they tried to emulate some of those ideas without really grasping the whole concept.
I don't remember the course hole-by-hole as it's been nearly a year since I played (played with Marcus Allen, no less) but the thing that I thought lacked more than anything else there was the fun factor...once you figure out how to get inside of 175 yards and have a look at the green, then the course drops to it's knees.
So pretty much, I think that it's better than most new courses out there around this area, and with the flood channels criss-crossing the land I am not certain that you could have avoided the long narrow "corridors" (really more like ridges or ribbons than corridors) that place such a premium on the tee ball. What bugs me is that this premium on the tee ball does not necessarily have to mean that the course lets up from the fairway into the green, and I think it does.
Rustic 9 ANGC 1 out of 10 plays, and only because I like variety even if only to the tune of 10 percent.