Brett:
"Triangulation" is just a simple routing technique to get the direction of golf holes angled away from basic side to side parallelism--something that most of the old architects tried to avoid (side to side parallelism) with their routings if at all possible--and that was a simple method of doing it. Obviously if the particular site was extremely limited it wasn't possible or was less so.
But if you think of a triangle, you can see that routing this way was subjecting the site to a certain loss of land for golf but if you narrowed the green to tee walks it would be less so (the top or point of the triangle as opposed to the base). Obviously this must have been done more for safety than variety or something like "boxing the compass".
Close green to tee proximity can be tricky business, I realize, but a good architect can keep things close if he's logical and realistic, in my opinion. In other words, this can be done really well if the next hole is going in a particular direction. If the next hole is coming back anywhere near opposite the direction from the last hole, then you have a bigger problem, although this is the situation to get into some clever "triangulation".
I'm not denying the concern for liability issues at all---it's a very real one and certainly today and is definitely a large function of the particular use of the course (50,000 rounds would be handled differently than 15,000 rounds). I've actually done a considerable amount of research on the liabiliy of golfers (or others) getting hit by golf balls and it's an interesting one in the overall logic of the law as it applies to safety (or lack of it) on golf courses.
In any case some people get overly concerned about safety issues from time to time in my opinion only because they focus only on proximity issues and sometimes forget to consider what is likely to happen or not on a particular hole or given particular situations. Gil Hanse for instance melded green to chipping area into next tee very close on three holes at Applebrook. On two of those holes the next tee is behind the green where balls are much less likely to be traveling quickly. This is far safer than two tight side by side fairways with LZs in the same basic area.
As an example of how basic proximity alone scares people, we have two tee boxes at GMGC that almost connect but the holes go in 180 degree opposite directions. The tees are so close that golfers will wait for the other hole to tee off simply because of noise and proximity.
We were looking to pick up yardage on both holes so I recommended in a total membership meeting to simply put the back tee marker on the front of the tees of the opposite hole. This costs absolutely nothing and would pick up about 90 total yards. Well about twenty people jumped up together and said: "What are you crazy, people will be killed!!" But I said golfers on both these tees wait for alternate tee off now and have since the beginning of this club and is it reasonable to expect that although balls will be coming in opposite directions that golfers will really stand within about 30-90 yards of each other in plain view and fire golf balls directly at each other. That's totally obvious so they all simultaneously said, "Oh yeah" and sat down.
Anyway, liability issues are very real but situations are more important to analyze than just proximity, in my opinion.