The Concession (155), 77.6
Promontory (155), 78.7
Red Ledges (151), 76.9
Old Corkscrew (153), 77.6
Broadmoor Mountain (149) 75.7
Ritz Carlton Dove Mountain (147) 77.1
If anyone knows the rating/slope of The Idaho Club, please feel free to post. I imagine it would be similar.
I don't know if posting the rating/slope from the tips is the most accurate way to measure whether his courses have softened at all in recent years.
Take the Dove Mountain course. It's an undeniably difficult course from the tips, in every facet. It's very long, features tough greens and some severe hazards, etc. But if you move up a couple decks, I think it's actually very playable for a typical high handicap resort guest (and this is a credit because it was exactly this dual purpose the course was meant for--it was meant to host a match play tournament for the best in the world, and also be a resort course).
The resort player will see a course with wide fairways, so even many a wayward drive isn't necessarily doomed to finding the desert, and very big greens. While the severity of those greens makes shooting low tough for scratch player, they aren't severe to the point where a resort guest is likely to be putting off them. They will assuredly have some three putts, but a high handicapper can do that on flat greens, too. There are severe areas wher you just do not want to be on the course, certainly.
There are some really deep bunkers, a water hazard, and a few holes with the requirement of crossing a desert wash to reach the green. And yet again on the holes with severe bunkering, there are always routes a lesser player could take around, less desirable maybe, but that's golf. As for the carries over desert washes, none are severely long and none of them really immediately abut the green. The wash in front of 18 green is probably the closest to the front of the green and I'd say there's still a good 30 yards of fairway over the wash before the green. The wash on 10 may be closer to the surface but that one has been cleaned out and plays more like a waste bunker than "desert."
The effect of all that is to make a shot look demanding, but still not necessarily result in a huge number of lost balls for a golfer who isn't hitting the ball great.
Compare all this to the other Nicklaus course in the area, La Paloma, which is a private/resort course and is demanding in the extreme. Nearly every hole features a forced carry over desert to the green and there are many fewer forgiving angles for a lesser player to bail out. The course was built in 1984 and, to me, almost typifies the way a Nicklaus design of the period seemed to ignore that vanishingly few golfers had the high soft iron game that Mr. Nicklaus possessed. Without that ability, everyone is going to struggle around that course. And that one, again, is a resort course. It's one thing for him to have built an absolute beast of a course for the private clientele of Desert Highlands or Desert Mountain up in Phoenix ... but La Paloma was presumably built for a different clientele being part of a resort. That's where I see the most growth in Nicklaus designs.