I refuse to believe anyone is more qualified to answer nonsensical comparison questions than I.
Old Tom Morris is vanilla. The original. He didn’t add much art of his own but simply let the ingredients and the simple but brilliant flavor do the work. We look back on a lot of his work now as “quirky,” but in reality his “ingredients” were where the quirk lay. He simply used them and let them shine without adulteration. Modern players would say he’s too outside the paradigm to be vanilla, and insist that vanilla would be more boring. But believe me, if you could taste vanilla ice cream from 1870, you’d find it a little quirky too.
Doak, C&C, and their ilk take the principles inspired by Old Tom’s work, and the work of subsequent practitioners of vanilla (none greater than Donald Ross, who spent a whole career doing intuitive work with a simplicity of form and brilliance of function). Then they add dramatic flair to the vanilla base in the form of artful bunkering and eye-popping textures and features. The average taster doesn’t even notice the vanilla base anymore when they play these courses. The star becomes the mix-ins. The post-modern architect is a master of starting with a vanilla base and turning it into cookies & cream, cookie dough, whiskey pecan, or any number of other flavors that start with the same fundamental and critical platform.
Let’s remember too that, while a brilliant pure vanilla flavor can be a reflection of true mastery, it’s only a plurality of people who order it. If we’re being honest, most of the people whose favorite flavor is plain vanilla are flat out boring and unadventurous. There have been plenty of architects catering to their tastes over the last 30 or 40 years, sometimes by offering a plain vanilla and other times offering a vanilla with trans-fat loaded, lowbrow mix-ins. The practice of making plain vanilla is not dead, but the art nearly is. While the vanilla-makers of the 1800s did their work with attention to detail and a fundamental understanding of where the flavor’s strengths lay, the vanilla-makers of today are mostly churning out a crappy product for consumption by an audience that really doesn’t care. The vanilla-artist is nearly dead. But while he may roll over in his grave when he sees what has become of his flavor, he can rest easy knowing that a great many innovators still stand on his shoulders as they explore all new ways to create new marvels on a classic foundation.