Scott - thanks much, as always an excellent and insightful tour. (You guys, with John M and Sean A and RDM and a few others I'm missing are really really good at what you do. Have you ever considered pooling your resources and experience and combining all the excellent photos and commentary in one place? The neat thing is that each of you brings a different perspective but all of you have very sound and perceptive perspectives). You had me from your first line, which I think states so clearly something that is, in retrospect, so obvious and yet not often enough given its due, i.e. that the 'baggage' that comes with templates is the ease with which they are compared. (Said comparisons are, btw, the bane of my existence - since the very act of making them ignores another obvious fact, i.e. that we actually play and experience golf one golf hole at a time, one golf course at a time, and on one very different piece of land at a time. We who say we love the art-craft of gca should be, I'd think, the last people who'd want to cherry-pick the 'best of', seemingly independent of time, place and circumstance -- and yet we more than most do exactly that all the time. There's a 'hungry ghost' quality to that approach that isn't very appealing)
Thanks again
Peter