Jaeger,
I worked golf maintenance in college, though and it affected me. IF the bunker lobes were too narrow, the sand pro left a pile in the middle, and of course, I had to get off the rake and smooth it out, all while trying to stay ahead of golfers on a weekend morning. Of course, with liners and hand raking, turn radius isn't often a consideration any more. It actually makes more sense to make bunker lobes smaller, to save both construction and hand raking cost.
It does illustrate the balance of such things in design. On courses with strapped budgets, things like that are a consideration. Paraphrasing what I said last month, bunker art is like masturbation, you only have to please yourself. Bunker design is like sex, as you have to please others. In this case, its the superintendent!
I hate to stifle you and your stream of thought. Of the topics you mentioned, the ones that interest me is chunking, knuckle buckets, topsoiling a bunker, sodding, and hydro-mulching, and how the interrelationship of those construction techniques affect the design/final construction.
It sounds like we consider similar things that I would consider basic design - line styles, edge styles, capes, bays, fingers, horizon line, foreground, and visibility/blindness. I prefer visibility and usually end up with a simple front edge, with no mounds.
I recall playing with a JN associate once, who told me they (and Fazio) ended up with a catch basin in front of nearly every bunker. The wanted the front edge to have a gentle concave swoop (not just be straight across) and that created a hole they had to drain.....so in went a CB.
I think I have told the story about Damian Pascuzzo and I doing the Wilson style bunkers at La Costa with the young shaper who did Sebonak's bunkers with JN and Doak. There was a lot of nuance discussion. DP was more worried about the front of the bunkers. I was mostly worried about the sky line and top edge, making sure each lobe rose a different amount and was a slightly different size and shape. The shaper was mostly interested in the mid slopes, like the angles of the noses and even which side of the nose the high point/ridge ought to be on, which I had rarely considered. Of course, Steve Pate has a few ideas, too.
So the joke was, how many architects/shapers does it take to build a bunker? LOL