"Why does it take so long, almost in cycle, for club members to understand and appreciate the value of the architecture that they had, that they disfigured, before they restore it ?"
Patrick:
You seem to put a thread on here on this basic subject like once every couple of months. Why is that?
Don't you know that the generation of our fathers when they altered a lot of those old courses didn't think they were disfiguing them? They felt they were improving them. Tastes, opinions, perceptions of the same things just tend to change over time; it's the complex tapestry of Human Nature.
Look at Victorian architecture, for instance, and Victoriana generally----hugely popular once upon a time and then the entire thing sort of "went into the attic," so to speak and then after about 75 years it had something of a renaissance.
My theory on most all this kind of thing---eg cycles, particularly in the United States of American, is we are basically "change oriented"; "change" is sort of the middle name of our country's ethos. We love change, we basically glorify change, we indulge in change and move forward extremely rapidly in some area or new direction (we consider ourselves to be the world's best and greatest "can do" people), eventually we tire and become discontent and what do we almost inevitable do? We look back to a former time and what it had and we bring it back, we recreate its look and feeling and we go through a renaissance with it. Obviously it makes us feel better about ourselves and the world we live in.
It's no different with golf course architecture. Why do we look back, bring it back and restore it? Obviously it makes us feel better; it takes us back to another earlier time, perhaps one we feel was of more innocence and sort of "human grounding."
It's not exactly a mystery, Patrick, at least not to me. Maybe it is to you, but don't fret, as I've always realized you need me to explain everything to you and for you!