Tommy:
Your initial question -- too long, expensive, and difficult -- suggests that you're approaching this query from the standpoint of the typical retail golfer. Like the blind men touching the elephant, I think one's perspective on CBay depends on how one views its role in golf.
It's pretty evident that in the past 20 years or so, there is an emerging trend toward building golf courses for the very purpose of attracting and hosting significant tournaments. True, there is a long history of courses being built to test the very upper echelons of the game -- see Pine Valley and Winged Foot as prime examples.
But Whistling Straits, Erin Hills and CBay are are public courses designed to do the very thing they are doing: hosting majors, and other significant tournaments. In turn, they "charge" a rate their owners view as commensurate for being able to play a "major" course. And look at some of their common characteristics -- they are all very flexible courses, can be stretched to enormous lengths (a direct reaction to golf's unwillingness to reign in technology; in an odd way, these "public major" golf courses help exacerbate the golf technology arms race), and promote themselves as places where the golfing public can test its game on the same courses as the very best in the game.
This is where the game is headed -- a bifurcated experience (not dissimilar to what we see in baseball or football) where there is a field of play for the professionals, and other fields of play for the rest of us. In a way, I see it as a hopeful trend, as perhaps golf's ruling bodies will stop taking their majors to architecturally significant courses (Merion East) and thus stop butchering notable features of those courses (one can only presume the good folks at TCC Brookline knew this, as they declined to host the centennial U.S. Open marking Ouimet's historic win in 1913.)
I don't view CBay as too long, or expensive, or even difficult -- its intent is to be exactly those things.