On this overall subject of Ross, and his lists of his inventory and what things he did, what they may have been called by him and what we might call them I wrote this a while ago;
This is an interesting back and forth between Tom MacWood and Paul Richards about what Donald Ross did on a particular golf course that may have been preexisting from another architect, what he said he did, what he called it, what it's labelled on some list, etc.
But when it gets into speculation about whether Ross was trying to feather his resume or course inventory or whatever and acting somewhat dishonestly we're probably taking things too far and we probably are beginning to split hairs.
First of all, we use all these TERMS today--eg, original design, rerouting, redesign, renovation, restoration, improvement, symapathetic this and that etc, etc, blah-blah. We should firstly realize that a Donald Ross or anyone else from that era may not have used or been aware of those terms or how we use them or those distinctions we use today even if they are clear today or were then which clearly they are not!
The best thing to do is to just figure out exactly what Ross (or anyone else) did and didn't do and call it what you call it! In this vein we're pretty good at labelling these things so that's what we ought to do and forget exactly how Ross labelled them because his perception and terminology could be very different from ours.
Later, I’ll try to label what I’d personally call the various things architects like Ross may have done on pre-existing courses or what others do today.