"Why are there so many of these conundrums?"
Mark:
I believe, or we believe (Wayne and I) that to understand why there are so many conundrums, or were, one just needs to understand better the evolution of the last 100 or so years of golf and architecture, particularly in America.
In a word, until relatively recently (perhaps only the last 15-20 years) no one, or not enough people really cared that much about who did what architecturally and certainly not the details of it the way most of us on this website do.
It may not have been until around the time of Cornish and Whitten's virtual bible of architectural attribution world-wide that that began to change somewhat. And then histories of many of these old clubs began to be written generally inspired by anniversaries of the founding or creations and openings of these golf clubs and courses. (For whatever reasons clubs really do seem to like "anniversary history" books. I guess they make clubs feel more established and more respected.
).
Those history books continued to increase as anniversaries arrived but oddly they usually explained the histories of the membership itself, their tournament records and notable occurences and the like. Very little seemed to be included about the history and evolution of the actual golf course and its architecture and contributing architects and the specific details of who did what, when, why and how.
The raw material to be able to write with some accuracy the architectural evolutions and histories of many of these courses were actually around to some extent somewhere languishing in the oddest places like in basements in boxes behind boilers (The Creek) or in barns in Bucks Co.
(How do you like that alliteration?!
).
But too often the raw material of those histories was lost---thrown out at some point, lost in fires or floods or whatever.
Why did the interest in it begin to regenerate? That's probably just a natural occurence of evolution and history itself that interest in things (often things old or as they get older) to cycle back again. Some of this interest, even world-wide, is obviously regenerated by a web-site like this which is so technically visible world-wide (if someone is actually looking for something hard to find).
The conundrums, in my opinion, is not much more than the lack of interest and inability because of lack of interest to look more closely at some of these issues and subjects. Face it, even C&W in its massive undertaking of listing architectural attribution and architectural bios world-wide and a general history and evolution of architecture in many to most cases had to depend for most all their information on the information provided by clubs themselves much of which was spotty, incomplete or just wrong in so many cases.
The good news is there probably is a ton of raw material info out there. What needs to be done with it is to simply have it compiled more centrally and made available for analysis or reanalysis in the future.
Just look at the new understanding of the creation of PVGC, long now considered to be the No 1 course in the world. For decades most of the raw material of information on its creation was there, probably tucked away in boxes unseen, but some of it was hanging right there on the walls for decades for all to see. Why didn't they make more sense of it before this? Probably because they just didn't care enough to take the time to understand how it needed to be analyzed and could be.
It all might be changing that way because of increasing interest. At least it seems some are interested in the compiling and the writing of more complete and accurate architectural records and histories and attributions etc.
How many will be interested in them in the future or what they will mean to the future of some of these courses probably remains to be seen but at least it seems a lot more will be there if some want to read them, and understand them and use them in the future for their courses.