Ian,
Yes, you might be in the post of the month, or even post of the year category. I have tried for years to get a design philosophy without a famous hole example thread going, and never got 20 respsonses!
The other way RTJ "balanced" out difficulty was short holes into the wind and long ones down wind, which I think should be opposite to accentuate the differences, even if a long par 4 may not be reachable in two shots. That one is usually hard for members to accept, even though the drivable 4 and reachable 5 seem acceptable.
Of course, I often joke that they follow the pro tour and its trend of "hard birdie, easy par" or "easy to birdie with one great shot (not two, plus a great putt) and okay to par....Only in the majors does it seem that a hole where "par picks up ground on the field" seem acceptable on the pro tour. That said, there isn't much fun in really hard holes on a daily basis, if you are of the card and pencil type.
In many designs and master plans, I have tried to explain it with the simple phrases "Nothing wrong with a hard hole once in a while" or "Nothing wrong with an easy hole once in a while." At one point, I purposely tried to design 4 easy holes into each golf course, with a seldom attained "target" of 1, 5, 10, and 15 as being easy holes. When watching the closing holes at the PGA last week, I wondered if having the 15th being easier might not have helped that sequence.
BTW, I have fiddled with the concept of "dividing holes" into their components, assigning a numeric difficulty value from 1-3 for tee shot, approach, and approach putt. Would most holes average a "2" on all those components, whether all factors were a 2, or there was a 1, 2, and 3 rankings for each, but they averaged 2?
Or, would you prefer a few holes to average closer to 1 and 3? Is there any strategic value if a hard tee shot results in only a hard approach, and a hard approach, successfully done, yields only a hard putt? I think there is some merit to average difficulty holes having a different variet of shot difficulty, as in a hard tee shot resulting in an easy approach, with average putting difficulty. A similar length hole might have an easy tee shot and approach, with harder putting, and stil average a bit under 2 or medium difficulty, but the scores might be the same.
Okay, so this post fits in the "pre-coffee morning ramble" category, but the above is meant to demonstrate that even average difficulty holes can have some variety, depending on which shots within them are hard, medium and easy.