"Basic architectural issues and rules issues are joined at the hip. Something understood better during the Golden Age than today. It was no accident that at various times John Low, Stuart Paton, Harry Colt, Croome and other architects served on or chaired the R&A Rules Committee. On this side of the Atlantic, Behr, CBM, Travis and other architects were knee deep in rules issues and controversies."
Bob:
True indeed; particularly the sort of so-called philosophical issues of rules and architecture.
There is a good section in Kenneth Chapman's book on the history of the Rules of Golf of the dynamic back then in the context of Rules thinking between what is called the "Conservative Party" and the "Party of Equity."
Chapman's book includes this from Low:
"During the past five and twenty years, men have been looking at the rules of the game from two very distinct points of view. We may style the opposing forces as the Conservative Party and the Party of Equity. The doctrine of the Conservative Party is easily understood; it lies round one fundamental principle: it makes golf a game of two sides and two balls and demands that every ball shall be played from the place where it lies. The Party of Equity holds that golf should be ruled by laws which mete out to each offense an absolutely just and properly proportioned punishment: it cannot bear that a man suffer unjustly or that the wicked appear to prosper while the slightly erring are discomfited. The Conservative Party holds that golf is a game of risks and hazards, a game in which a man distinguishes himself by his steady progress around a course, a progress which should not be needlessly interrupted,"
I don't really know how much Joshua Crane thought about and wrote about the Rules of Golf but if he did he would probably very much be in the camp of the Party of Equity with the Rules as he was with golf architecture, at least philosophically!
Richard Tufts and his book, "The Principles Behind the Rules of Golf" even if a good half century later appears to be philosophically much more in the camp of the Conservative Party.
It would be most interesting for those on this website today to seriously consider which camp they are in philosophically, while understanding that the Party of Equity appears to have pretty generally won the struggle in both the Rules and in architecture over the last 80 to 90 years!
The only man on here who I am completely sure is very much in the camp of the Conservative Party in a Rules context is Dan King, and God love him for his position.
Why did the Party of Equity win the day? My answer would be that some attempt to create more rather than less equity (or what anyone thinks "equity" really means) in pretty near everything we do just seems to be some everlasting goal of human nature.