I was thinking of trying out Mike's system, and asking everyone here to take the latest top-100 list and rate the courses on Mike's three categories. It would be an interesting exercise, if only to identify the biases of the current GOLF Magazine panelists -- if we didn't understand them pretty well already. [Hint: Challenge is a distant third on their priority list.]
But in the end, somebody would have to add up a bunch of numbers to create three lists instead of one, and it wouldn't change any of our own preferences, anyway.
The other thing is, I'm not sure that Mike's three categories really capture the most important aspect of golf courses, for me personally. My #1 category is Interesting. I guess you could say that's a combination of Fun and Challenge, but it is a particular combination, or perhaps just a tweak of the idea of Challenge.
The most straightforward Challenging course would have ten-yard-wide fairways, penal rough, lots of hazards, etc. And everyone would hate it! What most of us want is a course that's challenging without killing us in such straightforward ways. Some define this as "fair" -- but that's a four-letter word in my office, because it invites the criticism that a bad bounce is "unfair", when in fact razor-thin margins for error are a huge part of what makes a hole Interesting.
Interesting also covers the problem that if you keep repeating the same design, no matter how good it is by other measures, eventually that becomes stale and we would prefer something different. [see: Seth Raynor]
Interesting is pretty easy to break down, one hole at a time; but it can also be applied to the course as a whole.