Very interesting topic to me because the evolution of my thinking about sand and bunkering more or less marks my journey in learning about golf architecture. I hesitate to comment because I only have personal experience and no grand wisdom. If anyone cares about my anecdotal journey, and I can’t imagine many do, it goes somewhat along this path: worried about losing mature trees that had a significant strategic role in how our course played, I had an epiphany and wondered what would happen if we replaced all these trees with sand. I knew a little bit about strategic design and proceeded to look at every hole on the course in terms of tree removal and replacing the strategies with a combination of bunkers and sandy waste areas. I didn’t add sand to every hole. In fact, as I sketched out my ideas, I thought I was being very conservative and frugal with the use of sand. However, when satisfied with my efforts, I’d added over 50 sand features.
We’re a sand-based golf course, but our sand is “blow sand,” a very fine sand that has been deposited here by thousands of years of desert winds. An architect called it “silt” because it so fine it compacts into a surface that looks like hard pan and plays like almost nothing else. It is an extremely difficult playing surface for all golfers. As it turned out, my imagined bunkering scheme had a common theme: sand (presumably playable imported sand) was used more often than not as transitions from fairway/rough to native. I didn’t have a plan or goal to do this; it just seemed to my eye that the bunkers should go there to replace trees or add interest to playing the course. This also was about the time I decided I needed to learn much more about gca, bought a bunch of books, joined this site, saw a few courses, etc.
I won’t bore you with the evolution of my thinking about sand and golf design. I imagine mine was fairly typical: the more that I learned, the less I knew for certain, and the more I admired and respected professional golf architects. My amateur bunker doodling also evolved into a full future course master plan, done by pros and based on an optimistic future. Simultaneously, as all of this learning and creative thinking was taking place, the golf business was going rather the opposite direction. Not that great things couldn’t be done—in fact the last 20 years have been sort of a golden age of design—they just haven’t been done by ordinary people for regular golfers.
Put another way, when I look back at my bunker doodles given all I’ve learned since, they are surprisingly good. Clearly, they wouldn’t be built as drawn. Pros would take good ideas and make them much better and get rid of bad ones as a waste of time and money. The primary reason they wouldn’t be built, however, is there is absolutely no way our golfers, the golfers we know and support our course, would pay for the construction and maintenance these new features. My doodles would be very expensive to build and maintain. Does that mean our golfers wouldn’t like them if we built them anyway? No. It just means these golfers can afford or choose to play a much more modest version of the game than the sprawling fields of sand and immaculate turf. No matter how brilliant the design, how much it advances the art, one would simply need to find other, more affluent golfers to pay for most of these brilliant new designs (including well funded developers willing to take bold risks). Don’t know if this is an honest opinion. I feel it is realistic.