"For years they assumed that the only golf ball a good player would want to use is a three-piece, wound one with a balata cover. Now more than a decade after that assumption ceased to hold they are still trying to get their heads around the fact that someone could build a very, very different ball that good players would use. There's no way to put the genie back in the bottle and just wave their hands and say "Don't use balls that work a lot better than balata ones"."
Brent:
You said the behavior of the golf ball is complex and the rules (I&B) are simple, is probably an accurate statement to a large degree. In the history of the R&A/USGA monitoring and regulating of golf balls and golf implements it certainly is true that relative to the complexities of both construction and results in golf of golf balls and golf implements the R&A/USGA rules and regs are simple.
To us the results of how balls and clubs perform are paramount. The results of how balls and clubs perform are paramount to the USGA Tech Center too but what very few of us realize is how paramount the actual tests the USGA designs and uses are to them. In other words, they can only be as good as the tests they design and create themselves. Comprehensive I&B rules and regs are always subject to the effectiveness or the limitations of their tests to determine information of the complexities of the behavior of balls and implements. Just as this world has never fully understood, and may never fully understand, the potentials of technology in various areas, either has the USGA's Tech Center.
The reason for that should be obvious. It's hard enough for them to imagine what may be coming down the manufacturer pipeline at them which their rules and regs do not address or encompass. The ball problem, if one wants to call it that, is one of the best examples. They had rules to address, and they thought to encompass, golf balls in an ODS fashion but obviously no one really looked at what the relative results were both below and also potentially above that ODS factor of mph that was simply used in a scientific test framework for their over-all distance conformace "pass/fail" determination of golf balls.
That mph factor, in their opinions, back then, and in a scientific test framework could have been almost any mph. 109mph was obviously just chosen to some degree arbitrarily. Clearly no one really looked very hard to see if there were anamolies, in a linear sense, in distance production relative to swing speed of the various types of golf balls that were ODS legal. Spin rate was a factor, for instance, that was never regulated and still isn't.
In the last four years (since 2002) the USGA's $10 mil ball study has tried to look much, much deeper into those golf ball behavior complexities and they now believe to a large degree they have succeeded in their study. Because of that study, new rules and regs for both implements and balls may be forthcoming.
That's the way it goes with R&A/USGA testing, monitoring and I&B rules and regs writing. They're obviously getting much better at foreseeing the performance results of what may be coming down the I&B pipeline at them and preparing tests for it that can be translated into effective rules and regs on performance results.
Another more basic way to look at the history of I&B testing and rules and reg writing on the part of the R&A/USGA is when Frank Thomas came to the USGA in 1976 the Tech Center was not much bigger than a four car garage.
It's easy for us to say today that they should have known everything but that's just not the reality of the way these things work.