For PBaldwin: My (limited) experience has shown me that a slight "miss the Ding" hit (like within 2-3 widths of the desired "ding" line) will cost me around 2 yards of total ball travel - on SA, BPB, OAK, etc. & with any Iron in my bag!
Your comment as to "perfect mapping", introduces a slightly different variable. I believe that if you will "map" your irons, as described above, ((same ball, same golf course, only record "dings", hit ball in both directions (averaging the ball travel distance), with FBS, No Spin and FTS)) then you will have a pretty good foundation on which to base your play.
But this does not address your observation that the clubs' behavior change over time ......... If I play SA in the morning and play it, again, in the afternoon, I fully expect to see no difference in the way that my shots behave - HOWEVER - when I play SA the morning following (my hypothetical game here), I expect the club/ball combo to behave a bit differently!!
Why?
No conspiracy here, just my observations and the wild guess that the main WGT program varies the game's environmental conditions (just a bit) at some random interval (but rarely in the middle of a day).
This is not a joke, play a practice round, if only 3 holes, before you compete in order to learn how the ball/club/course combo is behaving that day. I could be wrong but I have found several threads that allude to the same observation.
Maybe I should just add this, to my last post, as #7: The game is very consistent. If your shots seem to be going a bit longer today, it's because of internal WGT environmental conditions may have changed - so take a bit of power off of future shots!
For BTBS: You are a better player than I am and you are correct in that "No wind" tourneys are excellent for "mapping" clubs - at that particular course. I still maintain, however, that each course plays (consistently the same) but differently from any other course and further, that WGT environmental "tweeks (SP?) must to be considered. If you use SA as the base for your data, you would expect that every #2 hole on every other course will play short. This is not the case. While each course plays a bit differently, BPB seems, from observation, to be the best "baseline course".
I'm thinking about starting a new thread on "Accuracy" in order to get the input of some of our real "player stars".