Drawing a circle around the hole to make an island green is a trick. You are doing something wrong if you have safety issues. Rethink the design or find a more suitable piece of land. I think there needs to be drastic redesigning all over the country. Junk courses are wasting baskets and giving a bad example. If you're wondering what level I play, here's a clue, who am I? I won 13 pdga tournaments in 1989.
Apologies. I tried to word my post to specifically not imply anything about your skill level (which I did not know, and which was irrelevant). I changed it from "better players" to "above-average players" for this reason. I was trying to post a reminder that there are different perspectives and, hopefully, different styles of courses.
Finding a more suitable piece of land is frequently not an option. We're usually in a "take whatever we can get" position. Some cannot be redesigned. I can cite several where mandos are for safety reasons---such as a hole for which the intended route is perfectly safe, but some big-armed players have figured out another route, over a ballfield, so a mandatory was put in to stop that.
Personally, I enjoy challenging and creative OBs, and a very high percentage of players I play with and talk with do too. I used to favor existing features being OB---creeks, lakes, roads, sidewalks---but opposed to ropes, haybales, etc., which I called "artificial OB" (even though they're no more artificial than the roads or sidewalks). Then I played a course that made massive use of them, and with the challenges they presented, is one of my personal top-5 favorites (out of 104). The Gold Course at Winthrop, home of the USDGC, shows others feel this way too; playing in the USDGC is highly coveted for many reasons, but the course is one, and many who don't get in are eager to play the course while the ropes are up.
Different strokes for different folks. I'm not crazy about mandos, except where absolutely necessary. So I built a private course, on which there is OB on 12 of the 18 holes, sometimes very close to the basket, but no mandos.