I've posted this opinion before but it does happen to be exactly my answer to this question.
I happen to love courses along the lines of Athens (GA), Camden (SC), Granville (OH) and Holston Hills (TN) that built as small-town country club style courses fairly typical of their place and time. Give me a day on any of those and I'll not think for a moment that I'd rather be playing somewhere else. My own club is a early-60's Ellis Maples design with some of that same design DNA.
Most of the courses I named were routed over their rolling terrain either in person or on a topographic chart by Donald Ross. In the case of Camden he actually consulted on a rework of an older course and Granville has been much changed in the ensuing decades. AFAIK, he did not supervise the construction of greens or bunkers at any of these courses although he did provide detail drawings of the shapes and slopes that he had in mind.
All I know for sure is that I like an awful lot of courses built to those requirements in that era that survived in whole or in part for the ensuing 75 years. Would those courses be just as suited to my taste if Donald Ross had had nothing to do with them? It seems doubtful but there's really no way to know. I am pretty sure that if we brought him in a time machine and had him build a course for Bobby Ginn somewhere in Florida next year the result wouldn't look a whole lot like Holston Hills.
My point being this, I guess. If you wanted to build a course on a nice piece of property to the same requirements as Donald Ross was subject to when he built some particular example that you like, I'm guessing any competent architect today could pull that off. But similar property isn't necessarily available and modern maintenance expectations would pressure him to make some accomodations and many people nowadays don't want to play on what they would view as a congested, too-intimate routing with tee boxes just steps from the incoming balls on the previous green. So be careful what you wish for.