But that's just the point, Ian: the site ISN'T telling C&C what to do anymore, the FORMULA is...or so it seems.
I don't agree with this at all. The way I've always explained Coore and Crenshaw's style to those unfamiliar with their work is that, for better or worse, they take exactly what the site gives. I've always suspected that this feeling had to do with Bill Coore's routing style and the idea that he routes by walking the property, almost blindly, letting the land lead him down paths that feel intuitive until eventually a vision of the routing comes into his uniquely gifted mind. I've probably completely romanticized the actual process he follows, but that's basically how I've always interpreted it. No one builds courses where the walk feels more intuitive, or where the holes fit the land they're on quite as well as Coore and Crenshaw. The downside is that sometimes the most intuitive routing produces long runs of holes that feel just a bit too repetitious, but the walk always feels like it explores the property in just the right way.
Going back to my friend Mike Hendren's post that really got this thread rolling after 10 or so pages, this is almost the opposite of the feeling that I get at Lawsonia. The routing there feels a lot less "natural" to me, starting with the first tee shot, then the odd way that the 2nd, 3rd, 7th, and 8th holes seem to burrow as far into the corners of the property as possible before reversing course like a Roomba working its way around the corners of a room, or the way the 11th just juts out almost randomly into the middle of a field before the hairpin turn that takes us back out 13 before we start doing the Roomba thing again as 15 and 16 almost belligerently insist on turning right and smashing up against the treeline instead of just taking the obvious path in front of them. If Lawsonia was still a dairy farm instead of a golf course, the cows would never walk the property quite the way that Langford routed it. And while holes like 2, 9, 10, 11, 13, and 16-18 seem to fit the land they're on like a glove in almost the way a C&C hole does, holes like 1, 6, 7, 12, and 15 seem to totally ignore the conventions of what an architect would intuitively build on the land they occupy. And maybe that sounds like a bad thing, but it's one of my favorite things about the course. It has a delightful audacity and, while not particularly difficult, it presents an awful lot of uncomfortable shots in part because it does the unexpected or unintuitive so frequently. It's not dissimilar to Crystal Downs in that way.
I haven't played Sand Valley, but I have admired the intuitiveness of Coore and Crenshaw's work while also wishing it wasn't always quite so perfectly married to that intuitiveness. I like to think maybe I understand some of what Mike might have been getting at originally, but then again, it's also possible that I'm just feeling the effects of the season of Love Actually, eggnog, and "Son, step away from the keyboard" again.