MTWilkinson:I'm sure there're plenty of supporting premises for the fact that the magazines don't do a particularly adequate job of rating golf courses. Of course that's just my opinion and someone else may feel they do a great job. Certainly they're primarily interested in selling magazines and how interested they are in really good architectural analysis, I have no idea. Certainly, the fact of their interest in primarily selling magazines is so fundamental and has been mentioned so much on here that I saw no real reason to mention it again. So, far from overriding my conclusion that they don't do a particularly good job of rating golf courses (or architecture), it supports my conclusion, as far as I can see.Frankly, I'm one of probably only a handful on this website who thinks that any rating when done in the form of numerical ranking is particularly detrimental and counterproductive to many golf courses and possibly even the future of archtitecture itself. I would much prefer specific architectural analysis of various golf courses for their inherent architecture or even architectural analysis of various styles. If a magazine writer wants to do that great. I would assume he would concern himself with explaining what's good and bad about that particular golf course and its architecture, and better yet, if he's going to get into that he could certain go on to explain what he thinks would need to be done to that particular golf course and its architecture to make it better. The general result of the numerical ranking method seems to have been to encourage golf clubs to do things to their courses and architecture that are the wrong things for them to do. Simply looking at what some course high on the rankings is doing and trying to copy or emulate it is as detrimental as anything since that other course may be of an entirely different age, style, purpose, agronomic conditions, whatever. But most of the people who do those things simply don't understand that.And I certainly don't agree with you when you say a Ron Whitten or a Tom Doak would be really a scary prospect for anaylyzing architecture. You seem to imply that they have no basis to claim they are more "expert" in golf architecture than anyone else. Really? How does an art critic or a movie critic or a food critic become a recognized critic then? If you assume that anyone has a much right to claim they are as valid a golf architecture critic as a Bernard Darwin, Herbet Wind or Tom Doak then I suppose you're saying noone should claim to be a critic. Lastly, I couldn't agree with you more that good old "word of mouth" and general unpublicized architectural evaluation and opinion is probably just as good as anything. The recognition of good golf courses and good architecture by no means started with the publication of the "best" of anything lists from these golf publications.Defenders of the magazine ranking lists say the lists encourage architectural discussion and that's a good thing. I'm not sure that it is since not having magazine rankings lists is certainly not going to stifle architectural discussion and evaluation, in my opinion. Most of the time the architectural discussion isn't even about architecture, it's about the criteria used to evaluate architecture by these magazines including the number of raters who have to see a course. And unfortunately 99% of the reading public actually takes all this stuff as gospel even though they have no idea how it works, and detrimental things can happen to some quality courses because of that. I also recognize that there are plenty of very knowledgeable contributors to this website who are fascinated by comparing golf architecture. I guess I'm not one of them and I don't see why I ever would be. I actually think you can have a very productive and valid discussion about golf course architecture and I don't even think you have to get comparative about it!But the magazine ranking lists do sell golf magazines, I'm sure.