This topic still annoys me because there is no consensus on what they are trying to measure.
GOLF DIGEST just dropped their rankings of "best new renovations" precisely because they couldn't figure out what they were rating. They had just been using the final rating score for each course that had done enough work to be considered a "renovation", which is a stupid way of doing it IMO - but certainly, if you were doing that, then Winged Foot would be higher on this list along with Seminole and Portrush and Turnberry.
If the rankings are supposed to be about "improvement", then I will stand by my argument above that some of the famous courses just don't have that much room to improve, and should not make this list. But the famous courses would have been peeved . . . even the Winged Foots of the world want validation for their sacrifice of closing the course and changing things around.
The sad thing was that GOLF DIGEST had plenty of data of old scores to go by, so they could easily have done rankings based on the Delta between the score before renovation and afterwards, but they didn't want to do it that way. They said it didn't make sense to compare the before-v-after scores because they came from different voters. As if that were not the same flaw in the whole rankings exercise generally!