Tim:
No, I don't want you to become a marketing guy for the manufacturers or anyone else, this is just a discussion group. And there's been lots of discussion on here for a long time, lots of interesting ideas of what to do about the apparent distance explosion in recent years and what it's doing to the future of golf and its architecture.
Theoretically the regulatory bodies have a number of options of solving this, I'm sure, as to what to do, but how to get any of them done and how successful any of them would be has become the question, I believe.
You say they should just give everyone adequate time to comment, definite transtion times and consistent testing standards and everything will be fine.
I wish that were so and actually that's what the regulatory bodies have been trying to do for some time now and have been quite unsuccessful at it. So anyone interested in solving this problem needs to look at why they been unsuccessful so far. Maybe the regulatory bodies have not been going about it in the correct manner but it's quite clear they are not getting much cooperation from the manufacturers with anything they've suggested or considered.
But if they could get cooperation from the manufacturers this problem would be solved in some manner, and probably very quickly. To me the solution at this point is to get the manufacturers to agree that something controlling distance or future distance is ultimately good for the future of the game, its architecture etc, and also good for them.
Coming up with a logical way of presenting relative distance vs absolute distance would seem to be such a solution--sort of. If they could sell the public equipment on the idea that it really isn't a matter of "how far" you hit the ball, but "how much farther you hit it than you opponent", then it really is no longer a matter of how far anyone hits it, is it, since it's only relative to the next guy?
And certainly if the manufacturers, for some reason, collectively came to the regulatory bodies tomorrow and said they thought that something should be done about the increased distance the ball is going and maybe an ODS rollback should be considered, have you a scintilla of doubt that the regulatory bodies would fail to endorse that idea in about a New York second?
So it's not so much the "what to do", to me, it's how to get all the parties involved to do whatever that is and at this point the manufacturers appear to be the biggest obstacle to considering doing anything about controlling distance.