A golf course takes a few years of planning, usually. Sometimes even more. This is not all plans or drawing. It involves site visits, walking the land, making tough decisions, meetings to push ideas and envelopes. It involves personality, tenacity and psychology. It involves reading: not only maps, but people and the tone of the project.
Then you must decide who will build the course -- and how. These also are not drawing or plans issues.
Then there is presenting the idea and getting that final buy-off of cost and approach. Still not drawing or plans -- and still not construction.
(I have left out entitlements: permits, environmental, zoning, etc., as have I left out the site selection and routing. Often these last two tasks take a year or more.)
There is engineering. Although most courses won't fall down, I did once heard about one that did. Drainage, safety and other logistics are crucial (usually).
Magic happens in the above. It also happens in drawing plans and sketches. And, yes of course, it happens in the field once the people who will convene to build the course show up with equipment.
But if you add it up -- all the decisions, touch choices, flowing rivers of wisdom, questioning, tweaking, engineering, creativity, and muster -- you will see that most (not all) golf courses have been influenced mostly by the happenings that are not construction, per se.
Please gentlemen -- get no idea that I de-value ideas and happenstance in the field. They are magic, to be sure. But to rely on them so heavily, and to believe this is where (most) great golf courses are born, is not reality.
Perhaps this will help: For every minute Jonathan spends on a dozer or watching a dozer, several minutes will have been spent well before these moments determining where, how and when the dozer even came to be at that spot. I think Jonathan knows this as he has obviously spent a lot of time in the field already and construction hasn't even begun. Of course, he also knows the fours years of approvals has been part of the picture.
And, yes also, greens and their surrounds are heavily directed and influenced in the field. But consider a green for a moment. Again, it is not just the surface or the elevational differences of building that has made it so. The green has been routed to be there, at the end of a par-3, -4, or -5 (or for a few who have posted on this site, a -6). It's backdrop is a vista, a canopy of trees, or a territorial view across some other part of the course. It has already been sited to take advantage of the terrain and the slopes and it has also been drained on paper by a series of decisions that will make it live a long life, hopefully.
Then it is shaped -- after making sure the soils being used are acceptable. The shaping happens in a few days. Perhaps 2-3. In hours? About 20. How much of that 20 is the "magic" of dozer change and field-arm waving? Depends. Maybe half, but I doubt it. Probably more like 25%, or just 5-6 hours. Again, not all courses are brought into the world equal. And, to be sure, some architects DO rely heavily on the field work, placing it not only above some other decisions, but in the greatest category of all.
All the points Tony makes are good. Shaping work and the magic thereupon is a terrific part of what we do -- but it pales in percentage to all the other stars that must line up for a course to be truly great.