okay, very slow around here so I was just thinking a bit about what ive liked about the game from its inception until now. of course we could go into many changes , mainly for the better with the progress towards tgc '19 but one things that's been a big game changer is the use of Lidar Mapping.
don't get me wrong, I love being able to sit down and play some accurately mapped courses that I would never get a chance to play in the game without Lidar. my point is,, we used to have some really meticulously crafted rcr courses such as **** National, Merion and, Congressional, just to name three (there are many more). the creators took great care into making each hole paint a sort of beautiful picture as the flyby ran off and it could be quite awe inspiring when it was done really well. and, now with Lidar yes, we get more accuracy but we've lost that immersive feeling and, we've lost that challenge from the designers to get better and better at creating/ painting the picture of each individual hole as best they can. using lidar you can just tell there isn't enough plant meter leftover to really create the environment for each hole and, we end up with very generic looking, accurate rcr courses and that's all. that generic look can get boring/stale after a while.
I don't know, it just kind of takes the immersion out of the game for me a bit.
okay im done,feel free to bash me.... 
I understand. Lidar is more realistic and, that's important.
There's so much to chew on, and I think the majority of the bad rep LiDAR courses have has been well deserved. That's in no part thanks to how easy the tool makes it to make what I refer to as 'spline, import, publish' courses. Even more so, it attracts newer designers (such as myself, especially at first) who view LiDAR courses as a way to wet their feet with the designer tools, and working on LiDAR courses eventually gave me the confidence to try branching into fictional ones.
My first one was pretty poorly made and deserves a remake at some point, where my most recent one (black rock cc tour) had over 170 hours put into it. Let's not forget about the work that went into checking bunker depths, smoothing out some rather horrific artifacts, getting the shapes right, and all the other initial polishing work that probably takes between 20 and 40 hours for most courses if you're going for a very precise result...but for the subject of this post that's not so important.
There was so much to do with the environment on this course and a finite amount of object meter (I think I started with around 60% of the meter available), so you have to budget what you do carefully. Unfortunately, in this instance it meant setting a priority order to see how much was available for each next step, which ended up being 20+ hours of rock planting before any grass went in. By then I had under half the meter left, so with how much grass there is on the course the only option was to spam plant all of it (25-30hrs). That went up to around 75% of the meter which was then spent on redoing the trees (~25hrs) using google earth 3d ground view as a guide as the course just didn't look right without them. Generally speaking I used whatever pictures I could find and abused the crap out of 3d ground view, and the end result was a course that, aside from a few greens that had some artifacts yet few pictures to show how they should be (and a few random minor artifacts throughout the course that would've taken another 50+ hrs to find and eliminate entirely) the course should be 99% accurate.
Anyone who takes on a LiDAR course and wishes to give it the 'full treatment' can end up with a very good RCR. You can make a far better approximation in just 10-20hrs with LiDAR than you ever could by hand, but these courses shouldn't be compared to a 'true' RCR since that isn't a fitting description of them. If you pick a relatively basic course with top quality data (upper half of QL1), it might take 'only' 60-90 hours for a detailed LiDAR RCR and some courses might need several times that much if the goal is to 'nail it.'
I would also go so far as to bet that the vast majority of published LiDAR courses have at least 15-20% of object meter remaining, or that if they look that way but it's not the case then perhaps creator may not have budgeted the limited available meter all that wisely.
