Chipoat:
Silva has also done restoration at Fox Chapel, where the Curtis Cup was played this past year, in addition to Lookout Mountain and Mountain Lake (which is now complete and is the subject of another thread on this site.) He also completely rebuilt The Everglades Club in Palm Beach FL, which had been completely made over, in the Raynor style.
I am the contractor from Lookout Mountain and Black Creek, where I am also an owner. Both are in Chattanooga.
I have played StLCC several times and made some good friends there, some of whom have come (and are coming again) to visit me and these courses in Chattanooga. I think StLCC is one of the very coolest of all joints, and have been very encouraged by my conversations with members there about Silva's plans. Certainly, tree removal is atop the list. The changes you reference re the 1st hole are in my understanding more in keeping with the original design....and what a Cape the 8th could be without those trees!
My advice to the Club would be as CB Macdonalds' advice was to Chicago GC in 1923: let the architect do his work. The most knowledgeable members of the Club can then make their arguments, but committees have a notoriously bad track record when it comes to working on courses, even their own.
At LMGC I was chair of the Greens committee when the work was done there; I advised the committee and the membership (and minded my own advice) that we could argue all we wanted with Silva (or whomever we selected), but at the end of the day, the architect had the final say. Doing anything else is essentially a waste of the Club's money and the architect's time.
Tom Doak did the work at Yeamans Hall and it is first rate, too. I don't have any doubt that there are a couple more architects who could do a credible job, but once the selection is made, it's best to defer to the expert hired for the work.
This site is a Petri dish of people who question every nuance of an architect's work, especially restorations of established gems like St. Louis. Whatever is done, it will not meet with everyone's approval. But anyone who claims to know what Raynor or Macdonald would have done is essentially making the same claim as the roadside palm reader.
I engage in the conversations on a limited basis, in the spirit of fun and for the sake of argument, but at the end of the day I think it's best to defer to a guy with an established track record who does this stuff for a living.
St. Louis has hired an expert; he'll do a good job.
If you want to know more about Black Creek and Lookout, drop me a private e-mail and I'll let you know some guys at your Club who know the courses.