Heh heh....Patrick, I knew you'd be getting on me for that post !
Still, when you talk about "the merits of a golf course" and the "desire for repeat play," I don't think that I need a reading lesson to conclude that many golfers' desire will be based on the architecture AND other things. You may believe that the only merit that a course has is its architecture, but not everyone feels the same way, so if you want to limit the notion of merit, you could easily have asked "isn't the true test of the merits of any golf course's architecture the desire to replay it repeatedly, as often as possible ?" I didn't mean to point to cost as the only other factor that matters, just as an example of one factor that does. Same with conditioning. I remember a number of folks writing on this board that poor conditioning made them unlikely to return to Apache Stronghold, although they admired the architecture.
And you can argue all you want about how "well-founded" a golfer's expectations are before playing a course for the first time, but does that negate the fact that the expectations certainly exist, and that a course NOT living up to those expectations might not foster the desire for repeat play? Or is it that a person that reacts in such a fashion is inherently a moron and therefore their lack of desire to play the course again and again shouldn't reflect poorly on the quality of the architecture but instead on the idiocy of the golfer in question?
I actually don't want it to seem that I'm disagreeing with you all that much, Patrick. I just feel like there may be other things that come to play besides architecture only that affects the desire on the part of golfers for repeat play. For most of us, though, that IS the major factor.