If the hole is well designed, a fairway can't be too wide.
Just because it is fairway grass, doesn't mean you should hit it there.
Maybe my favorite response on any GCA thread I've read in a long while. How much better would golf be if more architects understood this?
I agree completely. Too bad no one has super wide gang mowers anymore, a well designed course could be 90% fairway over the property and still be challenging. If you hit in the wrong direction, and the ground is firm, your ball gets even further in the wrong direction. You'll have a longer approach, from a non-ideal (or possibly terrifying) angle - if you even can see the green/flag at all.
Too many people want narrow(ish) fairways because they want the game to be "challenging", but I see a lot of holes where heavy rough actually helps the player by keeping their ball from going somewhere it would be far more difficult to play from (even where there were no trees, water, OB for it to get into trouble with)
The game would be sped up because it would be easier to find balls, and less time would be taken by players trying to figure out what club they can use to recover from the rough, choosing badly and hitting a short shot, then going through the whole exercise over again. Not saying that's the whole reason for slow play by any means, but it is certainly a factor.
If you didn't want to seed with "good" fairway grass, mow it as tight, irrigate it etc. you could still have something between fairway and first cut conditions over a much wider range on courses where angles matter - especially in terms of visibility. It might not affect the pros, but aside from elite players, most of us are at least put off a little bit having to line our shots up at a tree in the distance, or a cloud or a blade of grass on the hill in front of us.