An aside re the playability of larger bunkers. From what I've read, the average handicap hasn't dropped one iota in decades; despite new technology, golfers aren't getting any better. In fact, allowing for that new technology and the building of more strategic (i.e. less penal) courses, golfers might actually have gotten worse over the years. And I think they've also gotten more sensitive about it, i.e. if they're paying a lot of money to play high-end public or resort courses, they're demanding (via their choice of venues) that the designer not highlight their limited skills by, for example, using small, deep pot bunkers instead of expansive, flat-bottomed ones. (I don't often see those large bunkers on low-end municipal courses...though that probably has to do with a lot of other factors rather than with what I'm theorizing here).
All just guess-work of course. But off Tom P's post: if small bunkers force the golfer to, at least intuitively, blame himself for his troubles, maybe large bunkers do the exact opposite, i.e. allow him to think something like "Damn you cruel Fate, that has fashioned such a large expanse of punishing sand in the exact place from where I'd hoped to play my next shot." Maybe that's it: the average (i.e. poor) golfer who has paid a lot of money would simply rather blame Fate than himself for his troubles. "The fault, dear Bruno, lies not in ourselves but in that sand, that we are bogie-men."
Thanks for some very good posts, by the way. And Tom P, I'd been feeling rather poorly these last few days, but your lesson on Max Behrianism has returned me to the pink. Thanks (and mark me down in the "dork" thread if that wasn't a given already)
Peter