Some of the fairways at RSG are very severe. Questions to follow from that observation:
--Would they had seemed as severe if the course had had its fair share of rain over the past several weeks? If not, do you want to blame the R&A for the "course setup", or Mother Nature?
--Were the severest fairways uniformly severe, e.g. in a zone 200-350 yards from the tee? Or did some of them not get more and more severe as you went farther from the tee? (It seems to me that the latter might have been the case, in which case it was the pros' decision to hit drivers and three-woods and take their chances with bad bounces instead of laying up with long irons - even four-irons or five-irons, maybe - to leave themselves longer shots into the greens from the fairways. Isn't that a part of strategy?)
--Was the golf "completely random", or did good drives not find either the fairway or the short semi-rough at least 90% of the time? (I can't recall seeing a single good drive take a wicked bounce into a bunker or a thick patch of rough; signifcantly, I can't remember seeing a single bad drive ricochet back to the fairway or even the semi-rough.) The randomness involved that I saw had to do mostly with lies in the semi-rough and the wispy stuff just outside of it; most of those lies could be ascertained as flier or non-flier lies and played by the pros accordingly. If it was so tough judging distances out of the semi-rough, which itself barely deserves the appelation "rough" (I've played out of thicker fairway grass in my day), then why did I see a pretty normal-looking dispersal pattern of shots finishing long, short of and on the greens? (I also watched a lot of golf without ever hearing a player complain to his caddie immediately after a shot that he'd caught a flier when he wasn't expecting one, or vice versa.)
C'mon, guys...all I hear for 51 weeks of the year is that you need to bring the ground game into professional golf to keep it interesting, then we get an ideally set-up golf course for that, and now you're complaining? Methinks too many people have been brainwashed by American television commentators.
Cheers,
Darren
(PS - Nigel, your post beginning "The participants in this tournament are of the highest quality" is a model of clear thinking. The final leaderboard's composition should have nothing to do with this discussion.)