Mark -
You make several mistakes typical of all young truth seekers. You confuse an observation (and a pet term/theory, to which you are unduly attached simply because it is your pet term/theory) with a conspiracy or subtle secret worthy of the ancient gnostics. Of course, in retrospect, the 16th appears to be a deus ex machina -- but the drama you (and the rest of us) witness every Sunday in April is engendered not by some accidental alchemical process through which worthless architectural lead is transmuted into Masters tournament gold; no, it is the product of a conscious intent that your betters (and mine) carefully planned and created many decades ago, e.g. as sensei Tom D notes, the water on the left serving to suggest an apparently safe bailout to the right, which bailout leaves one with a terrifying and difficult downhill putt towards the same watery grave one tried so hard to avoid -- thus testing both nerve and skill and both long game and short all at the one same golf hole.
Secondly, you compound your first mistake by then arguing from your (faulty) premise to suggest that, since this championship Sunday drama is "manufactured" (and not organically issuing forth from -- and inherent in -- the design itself) it must be via a mechanism that most amps-up that drama, i.e. your so-called random score generator. I admit, a catchy term, and for the novices amongst us perhaps seeming to be a brilliant and significant insight; but in truth it is a description of nothing more than any and all golf holes (by great architects like Dr Mac and Donald Ross and Colt and Coore and Doak etc) in which, as the estimable Bob C has noted, "small differences in shot placement make such profound differences in outcomes." Now, feel free to stretch the meaning of a word like random as far as you'd like, you still will not have to apply to a situation like this, i.e. to a green site where small -- but definite and measurable and repeatable -- differences in "input" lead inexorably to definite and measurable and repeatable "outputs". In other words, what in retrospect appear as various good and not so good scores that, in retrospect, add greatly to the drama of a tournament Sunday you have all used (in some typically twisted gnostic way) as proof that the golf hole in question is an architecturally poor one instead of the great one that is has in fact proven to be. How strange.
Not to get all Pat M on you, but have you played Crystal Downs? As you may know, it is famed for many things, including its great set of sloping, contoured greens. Are those greens "random score generators" in your mind? If I am playing a match against a much better player, and somehow we come to the 16th hole all square, and I am hitting my third onto the green while he is hitting his second, but my shot ends up below that hole while his ends up above it, such that I sink my putt while he nervously twitches one that slides past the hole and keeps rolling, and then proceeds to miss the come-backer -- is the drama that is created manufactured, and is that manufactured gold a product of architectural lead? Please think carefully before you answer.....