"Would you rather......play the best golf of your life on an average lay out? Or would you rather play your average game on what you would consider a great classic course?"
Very fine question, Mr Powers:
Since most of life and experience doesn't exactly boil down to two-question answers, I'd say neither.
You don't know me very well but I'm the guy who's said many times on here that in my career in golf, mostly tournament golf, I'm the guy who basically never said "IF" after rounds and such. To me rounds of golf on any course just were what they were. To me there was no reason to post-mortem any round with "if" that and "if" this. I was the guy in the locker-room or bar after the round when people talked about how they played with what was invariably things like, "I shot 77 and it should have been a 70", would say things like, " I shot 71 and it should have been an 80."
For that reason, the thing I loved best was when I felt like I got absolutely everything posible out of a round, particularly on a great or hard course, I possibly could've gotten out of it and more.
No matter how I hit the ball, if I felt like I'd out-thought a golf course I was a happy golfer. Nobody likes to miss shots or hit poor shots and I don't either but the thing that really drove me crazy was when I hit technically good shots but thought poorly.