People get wound up about courses being altered, especially the well known classics. That has been going on forever and really started to get notice when Jones mucked with Oakland Hills - how long ago - certainly before I was born. As Brent says, people are people and most like to change things. I don't think extreme length in the top echelons of golf has been a positive for the game, but I don't think it is anywhere near its biggest problem. Besides, the solutions of rollback and bifurcation don't seem to have gained any momentum. To me, by far the easiest "solution" is for clubs to stop worrying about what the best players do and concentrate on whats best for their members. Seeing as how so many clubs seem to have no self control (people like to change things!) in these matters, the next best "solution" is bifurcation. I think it is better than rollback because I don't believe for a second that manufacturers won't eventually figure out ways around the rules. Are we going to just start rolling back every five years? To me its much easier to set broad guidelines (as now) and reduce the number of clubs to 8 and set a loft range of 15ish to 50ish, for the elite golfer. The hacker like me can play what he does now, but I would still say reduce the clubs to at most 11. The elite golfers play scratch on par, and the hackers play a bogey score with handicap. Its bifurcation which makes complete sense to me for two main reasons:
1. There is still the chance of "preserving" classic courses without having to constantly battle manufacturersmin what I think will always be a losing situation.
2. The gap between elite and hackers is bridged by the card (difference between a newly lowered par score and bogey score of maybe 7-10 shots higher than par) rather than by crazy numbers of tees cluttering up courses and added yardage. Remember, golf used to be run this way - during a time when a lot of the courses we admire were built!
At the end of the day, I think golf has bigger fish to fry than how far Dustin Johnson hits the ball.
Ciao