Jed, please excuse this aside. For some reason this thread reminded me of a story that director Frank Capra tells about "It's a Wonderful Life". He says he never recovered from the very luke-warm reception the film originally received in 1946 (by the public and critics alike); he says it shattered his confidence in himself completely. Indeed, during the next 20 years, this multiple Oscar-winning and prolific director made (I think) only or or two more movies, and then left Hollywood for good. And what's especially interesting to me is how he describes his loss of confidence, i.e. he says that for all his best years as a film-maker, he was utterly confident in his directorial abilities/craft, but even more confident in his ability to 'understand the audience' i.e. to understand what worked for a mainstream audience, what they liked and wanted to see. But in 1946, when audiences found depressing and uninteresting what Capra thought was his most life-affirming and best film ever, he lost that confidence forever; he had completely mis-judged what post-war Americans wanted to see, and he found it very hard to live with that. It is sad to me that a director I am very fond of was not able to separate out those two aspects of the art-business, i.e the quality of the film itself from the public reaction it garnered; and that he was not able to realize in 1946 that, while he may have indeed misjudged popular tastes for the moment, those tastes would change over time and the film he'd made and thought was a great one would eventually be seen that way by most everyone. And now that I've finished writing this, I realize what it is that brought it to mind, i.e. I'm glad our own Tom D is more balanced and healthy-minded than Frank Capra was back then, and that he not only seems to have a pretty clear idea of (and be pretty comfortable with) the way the course will 'play in the marketplace', but can also keep the issues of the mainstream-golfer's-reaction to Old Mac separate from the issue of the inherent quality of a golf course that he and his team no doubt worked very hard to try to make great. Apologies again for the ramble; I just started writing and found myself here/there.
Peter