Adam and Bill,
I am not sure this is a day and age of "massive fees" and unaffordability as you. Just as we focus on the 0.0002% of golfers who hit it over 300 yards, we focus on the few high end gca's who command big marketing fees. Most of the market isn't that way.
As to golf fees, I think public golf is very affordable right now, more so than 30 years ago, looking at some greens fees and the CPI calculator. There are also a wide variety across the spectrum of quality/price, moreso than in the past.
Golf construction has rarely ever paid for itself. Golf has always been made affordable by subsidizing construction cost through housing, wealthy people paying initiation fees or public funds for public courses and "public good." Or, in purchasing courses second or third hand (like restaurants) at bargain prices so that the greens fee doesn't need to reflect the cost of construction.
For example, residents of Newton KS and thereabouts can play a pretty fine golf course for under $30, including carts, because the city and developer worked out a deal to the benefit of both. Using the CPI back to about 1970, that would have been about a $7 green fee back then, which is what I recall courses charging then, so things haven't gotten worse on the cost side. Now, the income side of the lower middle class may have slipped a little after inflation and taxes, but that is beyond the control of golf courses, isn't it?
The architecture that is remembered, whether golden age or current, is state of the art, leading stuff, and that is what Forrest seems to be asking about. Do we remember the public courses of any era?
And, even for a low end course, like Newton, where I had to move over 480,000 CY of earth, some of it was paid for as "detention" as the course functioned that way. But it cost less than $2CY, so even if I had cut that by 75% to 120,000 CY of earthmoving, it would have saved $720,000 on a $7 Million (total) project, or about 10% - but of course there would have been flooding problems!
You might think that greens fees might have dropped from $30 to $27 in theory. But really, the city is probably paying no more than $60K in debt on that cost per year, which breaks out to only $2 per round over 30,000 rounds. And, the better drainage (feels slings and arrows coming......) may actually save ops costs and increase revenues.
If this was a high end course, that $2 wouldn't affect whether anyone joined, paid the green fee, etc. In fact, the high end club joiners seem to delight in overpaying for a lot of stuff as status, and who am I to deny them that pleasure? I wonder if a Palmetto Golf Club in Aiken would really work today as a club model.
Short version - there is not as strong a correlation between design styles and affordability as many people seem to think. It costs what it costs (within reason) and the market, operations costs and other things drive the greens fee as much as debt service.