David,
Of course, his bad example was one of my lakes. In it's defense, Colbert Hills is built on solid rock, those contours are mostly natural on the sides. We felt we had moved enough rock to chip away any more shape. And you can't build shape with fill because it wouldn't be stable. The natural slopes were pretty close to 30% anyway, just hard to change. Plus, the right fw is a cape hole, and thus subject to the fairly straight line rule. The last part of the left fw is on top of the dam, which by Kansas code had to be built to 100 year standard because there was no place to cut an overflow. And it has a concrete overflow structure so large they actually found a Honduran family living in it at one point. It is also the irrigation storage lake, and we weren't going to add wetland shelfs or anything else that would reduce capacity. So, things happen in design.
I do like the wetland edges on the other lake he showed in that post, and agree that a lake that disappears around a corner is inherently more interesting than one you can take in at one glance. One of the old English landscape architects was famous for that (Repton, Brown?) As to wetlands, sometimes required by enviro reggies (wetlands) and some times reviled for blocking the green just beyond it for vision! Every lake is its own design project.