Patrick,
It's unusual that I completely disagree with you but in this case I couldn't disagree with you more.
If in 30 years golfers become proficient with hitting 75 degree wedges 120 yards on the fly, should Oakmont build 15 foot high mounds in front of each bunker?
Oakmont is a golf course with a long and wonderful history and almost no course protects par better at the "green" than do the rolls of the greens at Oakmont. From a historic perspective, the proper decision to counter the advances in the game, and consistent with the historical design challenge of the course would have been to reintroduce furrowing in the bunkers.
Instead, I'm sorry, but they look like linear grassy speed bumps across a really neat and starkly natural rolling Steel City landscape. That's the case on both your aerial as well as the ground photos others have posted.
Oakmont was never a course where a drive into a bunker meant a boring explosion shot back to the fairway, simply because Oakmont has 100+ bunkers of all shapes and sizes impinging on both sides of most fairways.
At some point, it risks becoming penal overkill, but even if that's acceptable to the membership, boring chop it sideways golf should never be. Nor should rote construction techniques that make the bunkers appear to be stamped out on a factory assembly line.
I find it a bit sad that a young guy like Ryan is so used to needing to see "WOW" bunkers on golf courses that he thinks the pre-Fazio Oakmont bunkers were "boring".
I'm in favor of trying to keep up with technology...to a point...for our championship courses, but when it means introducing design features completely foreign to anything previous on the 100 year history of a great course, then I think we are wrong when we give it a free pass here, just because it's politically correct.