Kevin,
I support your premise. Tom Bendelow clearly belongs in the World Golf Hall of Fame. The number of golf courses he designed was staggering, and there was obviously quality work among the sheer numbers.
But I think the reason he is not recognized along with Ross is that a much higher percentage of Ross's work remains intact. Bendelow did much of his work in an era when the game was new and standards of quality were not widely understood or appreciated. Most of the work he did in Minnesota, for instance, was redone, and fairly early on. I'm still trying to determine for certain whether Bendelow expanded Northland Country Club in Duluth from a 9-hole, member-created course to an 18-hole course in 1912. Whether or not the work was his, it was almost totally redesigned a decade later -- by Donald Ross. The same is true at Golden Valley, where he was brought in to design their first 18-hole course in 1916. He said at the time that it would be one of the best courses in the country, but a decade later Golden Valley brought in A. W. Tillinghast to completely redesign the course.
His original course Edina Country club has been reworked so many times that I'm not sure current architect Tom Lehman would know what to restore even if he wanted to.
In Herbert Warren Wind's New Yorker piece on Trent Jones that Tom Doak referred us to, Wind talks about these early course designers (though not Bendelow specifically), calling them, if I recall, "Sunday architects." They would arrive at a pasture, put a stake in the ground for the first tee, put another stake where the middle of the fairway should be, and a stake for the green, then proceed to stake the next hole and the next. The entire process would take a few hours, for which the architect would pocket $50 and be on his way. I'm not saying Bendelow was that kind of architect -- there are some terrific courses on his resume, and for them alone he belongs in the Hall of Fame -- but at 600-plus courses, he had to be closer to a "Sunday architect" than those designers who are more widely celebrated today.
Bendelow seems to be paying the price for being just a bit too early to the game. Had he arrived in America a decade later, he would surely have benefited from the same advancements in technique, budget and philosophy that Ross and the other Golden Agers profited from.