I think you can look at the question from two perspectives of fairness. One is not really debatable, that two players hitting to the same spot would get the same relief. The debate on fairness here is whether it's fair to the player who hits the fairway that his competitor, who hits the rough, gets the free drop to the fairway. I don't think that's fair, but it also seems to have more to do with luck than anything, and it's near impossible to legislate luck.

As an example, I played Dragonfly with LMS at the beginning of the season and I bet he hit 5 trees on the back 9. Every single one of those shots bounced back into the fairway. I hit more than a couple trees myself, but none of them came back. We hit similarly poor shots (I hit a lot more of those, don't want to malign LMS's game by comparing it to my own...) that had very different results. It wasn't 'fair' but it was just luck. Ninety nine times out of a 100, if you hit it into the rough, it will stay in the rough, Stenson just got a lucky bounce.