Just my humble opinion as someone who would be interested in trying my hand at something like this, but...
I think you gotta use a topo, otherwise people can invent whatever land they want. I can picture some really cool holes in my mind and maybe others might think they are cool too. But unless you have a Shadow Creek budget, you can't really bend the earth itself to your whims, so its not very realistic. However, while I understand the theory of a topo map, it doesn't put a usable picture in my head. If the topos had more of a 3D look to them instead of just line drawings with elevations on them maybe it would help.
Perhaps if you took an aerial of a real life piece of interesting land (hopefully largely treeless and taken at dawn or dusk so we can really see it) and then a topo of the same land, those of us who don't see golf holes when presented with a topo might have a better shot. Perhaps some of the architects here could come up with a few of these for us to choose from. It would be interesting to design a hole on a piece of land and then find out it was part of Sebonack or Sand Hills and see what the real pros did with it (obviously they have more constraints having to worry about routing that we wouldn't doing a single hole, but still)
I'm ambivalent about the redrawing part. I can't draw for crap, so it could help. I guess I could make up for lack of artist skills by explaining what I'm doing, but that makes it harder to re-draw correctly, and we certainly can't ask for editing rights on the re-drawn hole
I could probably muddle through the drawing part with some simple line drawings in pencil that would hopefully get my idea across, the reason I haven't ever tried this before is primarily because the topos just don't "work" for me.