I don't think the routing for a place like Muirfield or Shinnecock or NGLA or Pine Valley could be considered "self evident".
NGLA's routing may have been more 'self-evident' than you suggest. CBM says he found an ideal Alps hole on the site... and then looking back saw the setting for a perfect Redan. The Road Hole was easy to duplicate, he says. Overall he placed the templates first. That may have molded much of the rest of the routing.
In fact, IIRC Patrick Mucci says CBM routed nearly the entire course over those first few days of exploring. I don't agree -- think that requires a pretty tortured reading of CBM's writing -- but I do agree the templates came first and probably set the structure for the entire course.
I wonder if using lots of templates simplifies/shortens the routing process. In under ten years (1917 on), according to CBM, Raynor routed and built 100 to 150 courses. 10 to 15 a year, possibly more. And Raynor was not much of a golfer, if any. It seems to me that walking onto the property knowing what a number of holes will look establishes kind of a fledgling blueprint for the entire course. Can any architects comment on this?
About whether Friar's should be a ten: technically, Friar's is a 10 on the Doak scale if and only if Tom says it is. It's his scale and ratings. Only he can say which courses are tens and which are not.
If we assign our own Doak-style ratings to courses, the first issue is defining exactly what a ten is. Tom gives his guidelines. But they are pretty general. He doesn't always follow them himself.
Does a ten mean one of the world's top ten courses? Top twenty? Or could we have hundreds of 'tens', if the courses were simply good enough?
Tom has something like 13 'tens.' If you think Tom should give Friar's a 10, you're pretty well saying he must consider Friar's as one of the world's 14 best golf courses. Never played or seen it, so I can only go on what I read. The members of GCA who took part in those unofficial rankings in 2009, did not place it that high, at least as a group. While it did get at least one 10 rating, the average score was 8.4. That put it in a tie for 27th place, along with WFW, TCC Composite, Sandwich and Highland Links.