It seems to me that the debate that evolved in the mid and late 1920s that we're referring to between Joshua Crane on the one hand and the likes of Mackenzie/Behr et al on the other hand is sometimes miscontrued to some extent by us and may even have been somewhat at cross-purposes by even them back then.
The first thing to do to understand it all, in my opinion, is to identify, define and explain the philosophies they were proposing and supporting and the only real way to understand that is to first identify, explain and understand the words and terms they used back then and what each really them meant by them.
If we do that I think we can see that their debate was not exactly as black and white as we may think it was and it also may be that, at least the Joshua Crane side was actually proposing, to some extent and in some ways, the inclusion and development in golf achitecture of what we have come to think of and call "strategic" architecture.
(In a way, it seems to me that the Crane vs Behr/Mackenzie debate over apparent "strategic" vs "penal" architecture may've become a casualty of what many of the good threads on here become a casualty of----eg the participants, for whatever reasons, tend to get personal and somewhat insulting with one another despite protestations to the contrary, and as a consequence of that both they and others tend to misconstrue things, including the original underlying subject).
In the end we may even find that in some ways it was just the manner in which Crane went about proposing "scientific" or even "strategic" architecture that upset his counterparts in the debate (who we ironically call "the strategic" set vs Crane's "penal" set).
What was Crane proposing:
1. Firstly, his own mathematic formulae for ranking golf holes and golf architecture as to quality.
2. The minimization of "luck" in architecture and golf. He proposed this through his recommendations in how to produce a form of "graduated penalty" as well as how to remove to some extent the prevalent "bad breaks" that he felt some courses and types of architecture produced (he cited the odd break that determined the outcome in the Hilton match at Apawamis as an example).
3. Crane felt that any golf course, particularly such as the very old GB ones (such as TOC) could be improved by applying to them a far more "scientific" method of golf architecture. (The word "scientific" architecture---and sometimes its virtual synonym "modern" architecture was prevalently used during that time by a lot of architects and writers including Tillinghast, Trevor, Taylor, A. Linde Fowler etc).
4. It is true that Crane may've been proposing his theories more from the perspective of the good player or even the championship player but even that is not particularly certain---eg he did mention that architecture should certainly not concentrate on penalizing less accomplished players in various ways.
On the other side of the debate were the likes of Behr, Mackenzie, Hunter, perhaps Thomas, Macdonald and Bobby Jones et al.
And what were they proposing or taking Crane to task for?
1. Essentially for attempting to reduce the worth or quality or particularly the analysis of golf architecture and particularly some golf courses to mathematical formulae. The were saying that it was not worthwhile to attempt to reduce the value of a course or its architecture to some "yardstick" analysis (a mathematical or even scientific formula).
2. That the old fashioned and traditional fact or even charm of luck born of randomness or even rawness should not be removed from golf or even tampered with. This kind of challenge to the existence of luck in old golf was probably under risk, at least in their minds, by the application of such things as various forms of "graduated penalty" architecture.
But the odd thing for us to consider today is that some of the proposed theories and philosophies of those who suggested the benefits of "scientific" or "modern" architecture really were, in so many ways, the very same things we think of as "strategic" architecture and which Crane's opposition probably thought of as "strategic" architecture.
Crane was not a supporter of trees on courses generally, at least not in a way that excessively affected play. He was not a proponent of excessive OB, not really a proponent of excessive WHs.
But more importantly he was not a proponent of either cross bunkering or cross hazards perpindicularly across fairways which was the OLD "penal" architecture and he was not a proponent of hazards and bunkers and such on both sides of straight holes that had become the newer form of penal architecture.
Crane was very much a proponent of the diagonal angle in golf and architecture and his favorite feature was the so-called "double diagonal". Crane did not seem to mind such things in architecture as a bunker in the middle of a fairway that became known as Behr's "Line of Charm".
In many ways those architectural features are and were a staple of "strategic" architecture or perhaps even its evolved form in what eventually became known as RTJ's "Heroic" architecture (perhaps best described as some form of the melding of "strategic" architectural principles with a more severe form of incremental single shot penalty).
So what was this debate all about really?
It seems like it was about a lot of things----some understood and fleshed out better than others regarding the opposing sides' positions or proposals.
But mostly it seems it was about defending tradition and traditional courses against certain forms of innovativeness and redesign----and the nub of the issue centered on the most traditonal of all, TOC. And even in the mind and words of one from the new "scientific" side, J.H. Taylor, that was not something that should be done!
Where was Bobby Jones in all this?
Probably in something between a rock and a hard place since his under par victory at TOC added huge fuel to the analysis of TOC as not strong enough any longer to remain as the championship test it had always been assumed to be. Jones was in fact on the Behr/Mackenzie et al "traditionalist" side but it was he, after all, who shot that score at TOC that fueled all the fuss.
Was this simply a debate about strict "penal" architecture on the one side and the more thought provoking "strategic" architecture on the other side?
I don't think so, or at least not in all the ways we think of that basic comparative subject.
And what about the golf ball (Haskell) in this entire debate?
In my opinion, that's almost another subject altogether for another time and another discussion because it very seriously evolved into the larger debate and discussion of "standardization" and these guys from both sides were of varying minds no matter which side of the Crane vs Behr debate they'd been on.
Should this mysterious Crane vs Behr debate (sometimes referred to by us as the debate of "penal" vs "strategic" architecture) be revisited today?
I don't think there's any question it should be. This is the type of subject that underlies a lot of what we talk about on this website. But the Crane/Behr debate was not, and is not, like a lot of what we talk about on here, all that easily categorized into simple blacks and whites.