Tony,
You're asking for anecdotal experience and that's all I can give. I don't mean this to be a USGA rant but I'm sure it'll sound like one anyway. It gets cold here on the Canadian Prairies and the summers can get warm. The last two days it's been 30 degrees and yesterday was windy. I just finished playing at my home course, the Wascana Country Club. It has 11 greens built to USGA spec over the last decade and 7 older greens of varying age and construction. The new greens have been and continue to be a major headache even though portions of most have been rebuilt. Many of the greens were built with rather obvious tiering (almost a stepped effect) and originally the top side of many of the tiers would actually slope away the opposite direction. Bird bath ridges on the high side resulted and, as you've noted, anywhere water tends to collect and freeze over winter really fries the turf come spring. So the low areas just above the tier transitions performed very poorly through the winters. The greens were reconstructed to remove these areas and in most cases it has been effective in eliminating areas where water used to pond and freeze.
But the greens are still performing poorly. Although they have been flattened considerably through reconstruction, any remaining higher areas in the newer greens are chronically fragile and turn crispy and blue within a couple of days of heat like we've had recently. Speaking anecdotally, this perched water table stuff really seems like a load of you know what. There is no way there is moisture perched in these high areas. Yes, the high areas on the older greens, particularly if the pin is set there and there's a lot of foot traffic, will show some stress when it gets hot and windy but nothing remotely close to the newer greens which in a few cases have repeatedly regressed to bare sand.
At Katepwa Beach Golf Club, we couldn't afford "real" greens, so we built them out of (too fine) sand located on site, mixed some manure in, were playing on them within a couple months of seeding and have had excellent performance since. Again, purely from an anecdotal hearsay basis, I've heard it said that in our climate, courses have had good luck amending their sand rootzone with a little soil or organic mix but by the text book that is still considered a real no no.