Has it really ever progressed much beyond/deeper than Nicklaus' primary philosophy-strategic goal of "eliminating one side [in his case, the left side] of the golf course"? And should it / does it need to progress any further than that, given that the strategy was sound enough to help secure 18 major championships?
Uhhhh, yes.
And "eliminating one side" is bogus anyway.
Eliminating one side is not really bogus. Good players do it all the time, but they do it by adjusting their aim/shape, rather than by changing their shotgun pattern. Everyone has a shotgun pattern. I've discussed this directly with Fawcett. It's a semantics thing.
In other words, if 100 below scratch golfers / pros play a golf hole with water right off the tee and not a single one hits it in the water all day because there's enough room left to not do so, and then you take 100 random 12-cappers and have them play the same hole, many of them will hit the ball in the water,
no matter what they do or where they aim.
Effectively, the solid players/pros have "taken one side out of play" by completely eliminating the water ball off the tee. Some will do it by aiming farther left and hitting a cut/straight ball. Some will take it down the water line with a draw. But none of them will hit it in the water -- or maybe 1% to 2% depending on the hole.
I asked Fawcett, point blank, if he thought that if you took 100 pros and had they aim directly along a water line, could all 100 of them get the ball to miss the water left, and his answer was, "Yes." His further response though, was that they
could not do that without expanding their left miss considerably in order to do so. And that's absolutely correct also.
But they did, still, "eliminate the right (water) side."