You have to appreciate the malleability of errorless play. When the definition was "errorless play plus 2 shots from short range" errorless was defined as if an expert could reach short range with his best shot. Now that the 2 shots part has been dropped and it's strictly "errorless play", suddenly errorless play is now defined as if more than 45% of experts can consistently do it.
The words "reach" and "plus" were never in the definition. It was "...errorless play under ordinary weather conditions, allowing two close range throws to hole-out". So, if errorless play already included two close range throws (finishing the hole by landing near enough the basket to make the putt seems quite errorless to me), the phrase "allowing two" would have no impact. I think "allowing two" was in there so players did not need to make long throw-ins to get par.
Par 3 is still not
defined as 45% of players getting a 3 or better. That's just my
method for getting at a suggested par that is very likely to be the same as what the actual definition would produce, and is almost certainly not too low, and also produces very nice results in terms of being useful for all the things we want par to do.
It would not be possible to always determine the score that would be expected with errorless play by just looking at scores. However, it does seem to be possible to find a score that is almost certainly not lower than what would be expected with errorless play. That's what my formula does.
For example, I am at the point where I think #17 at Idlewild should be a par 3 even though fewer than 45% of players got a 3 or better. It just seems that with errorless play an expert should be expected to get a 3.
My formula suggest par should be 4, but just because too many players don't know how to avoid the temptation to go for a 2 doesn't mean that going for 2 and taking a 4 is errorless play. It also does not seem that playing for 3 but ending up OB (for 4) would be errorless play. So, par of 4 doesn't feel right, even if that's what my formula would suggest.
However, I wouldn't want to lower the cutoff point down to the 24% of players who got a 3 or better. That would make par too low on normal holes. I'm thinking I'll leave the formula as it is, and let TDs identify the holes where par should be lower than suggested because there is so much punishment that unusually few experts can play errorlessly.
With any remotely honest reading of the current definition, half of par 3s would be 2s, half of par 4s would be 3s, and almost all 5s would be 4s.
Not that many par 2s, but yeah, that's essentially what would happen. Primarily because most Open tournaments are held on courses with pars set for the masses.
As an aside, if you're going to continue this thread, can you please remove the annoying 2 year old poll at the top?
I'd like to. How?