Lester, most sites were simpler then, and the costs of failure were nowhere as evident then at opening or a year or two afterwards, so they could get away with stuff or just learn on the fly.
By the end of WWI, the neophtes had been selected out and the ones who were left -- Ross, Mackenzie, Thompson, et all -- proved themselves pretty talented. But if you read through Bob Labbance's book on Vardon's 1900 tour you get a pretty good sense of the disastrous state of those earliest U.S. designs, anyway. Trial and error.