I can't believe I'm saying this because ranking and rating really isn't my thing--but restorations are of great interest to me--any and all of them.
Restoration and restorative efforts of classic golf courses in America is a relatively recent thing too. But it sure seems to me that the restorative process, really good restorations etc is reaching a critical mass now and is sort of quietly building up steam and rolling across many of America's classic old courses. So many clubs seemed to have rerealized what they have, are finding some old aerials, photographs and documentary material and have hauled it out and are analyzing it and starting to call architects! It's important to call the right ones though!
The architects that do it and do it well also seem to be unbelievably busy now: Gil Hanse, Ron Forse, Brian Silva, Ron Prichard, Bobby Weed, Tom Doak, George Bahto and a number of other good ones.
There's something very satisfying to me to see a guy like Ron Prichard at Aronomink walking around with Donald Ross's plans and drawings constantly in his hand! Brad Klein's book outlines a number of really good Ross restorations that have been done. NGLA, Merion, Yeamans, Fishers, GMGC, LuLu, Huntingdon Valley, Oakmont, Shinnecock, and tons of others are doing it now.
With the design evolution booklet I did on my course I seem to be talking to people doing it too all over the place; Mass, Pa, Georgia, Michigan, Illinois, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, NJ, etc.
A lot of the architects that are doing it tune in to this site too as do a lot of the people at the clubs that are doing it.
There seems to be a lot of available dark brown space on this page to the left there where this site might be able to include a section for a list and analyses of these welcome restorations of classic American courses.
Hopefully those at the clubs that are or were involved might then come on and contribute and others considering this process would come on too for information, collaboration and Q and A.
God help me for proposing rating and ranking, but should Golfclubatlas itself start to get into doing that? If it did it would probably be the only one--it certainly would be the first one to do it!