The most startling aspect of your position is how it seeks to absolve itself of all accountability and responsibility for caring for a game that, as is the case with every golfer, has given a whole lot more back to you than you can ever hope to contribute to it.
If you'd like to apply the same logic to everyone who didn't step in and ensure that we're still hitting featheries with grooveless, metal and wooden-headed clubs with wood shafts and no real grips while wearing heavy jackets, then I'd at least applaud your consistency.
I care very much about the game. I simply disagree that there's a "problem" in need of solving across the entire "game" of golf.
"Sorry folks, I know your golf course has made golfers of all abilities happy for a century, but I'm going to have to ask you to reduce your client base because some of them hit it farther than you knew to be possible when your course opened. Hope you planted enough trees between the fairways so that golfers don't get hit by tee shots sprayed farther than you ever expected!"
You said "What sense does it make to continue to coddle the class of golfer" and so my response was "so don't." You pointed out that they're often playing for a reduced or even free rate, so why cater to them? And you said that those were the back tees, implying that if they no longer visited the course, the course would still have room to grow should the 90-95% of golfers somehow find more distance.
It is a demonstrable fact that golfers - especially the ones who drive perceptions of what a golf course should be like for the rest of us - hit the ball farther than ever before. This has fundamentally altered the way thousands of golf courses play, relative to the intent of the people who designed them.
I'm not denying any of that.
And yet, 6500 yards is long enough for the vast majority of golfers, and for those 5 or 10%, there are plenty of courses longer than that for them. For the PGA Tour, a tiny portion of the game, I don't care if they shoot -27 in a week. They're not "the game."
Rather than the integrity of these courses - and the small businesses that many of them represent - your position defends the manufacturers
No, it doesn't. It just doesn't agree that there's a "problem" in need of a solution. It's not like equipment is unregulated and someone's going to find 30 yards via equipment. And my position is also that if a change happens, for the disruption that it causes, that it not be a change just for the sake of change without truly knowing what the end result will be. If you want to say "make the ball spin more," and you don't know exactly what that's going to cause, or how people might work around that in a heartbeat…
Did the grooves rule really change much? Did it accomplish much? Or did the engineers figure out how to work around it pretty quickly? Was it worth it, to change that rule?