The definition of preeminent doesn't really matter here, but the inclusion of that word does. If you want to become a preeminent hitter as a ground ball specialist, you need to be able to replicate the production volume of Ichiro or Tony Gwynn. In the absence of production volume, the only way to become preeminent is to do the sexier stuff.
I paid attention to MLB a bit during my childhood, mostly from about 1992-1996 or so. Two players stood out at the time as being far and away the most popular among my peers. You'll guess one right away - Ken Griffey. The other guy, though, was probably even more popular among my own classmates, and he was certainly more popular with us than Barry Bonds despite not being anywhere near as good. It was a simple equation: visibility + power + flair = Baseball Preeminence. Bonds had power, but he had so little flair in his game at the time that I remember ads focusing on his damn earring to try to make him seem cool to kids. Meanwhile, David Justice played almost every game on national TV in the eastern time zone in front of a crowd with a corny, derivative, and iconic ritual cheer, and hit and threw the ball harder than anyone else on his nationally-televised team while playing with a sense of cool nonchalance that led to most of us getting our first concussions by trying to one-hand fly balls like he did. He nailed the categories of visibility and flair, and he had power. It didn't matter that he was probably just a mediocre baseball player.
I do think there are some signs of strain when it comes to this current era of golf course architecture. While we've seen a lot of great new courses built in the last 20 years or so, I think it was about four years ago that I was driving through the entrance of one of these new modern marvels and thought for the first time "Man, this sorta looks like every other course built with much acclaim in the past 15 years." Just as we now look back at stars like Justice and realize that hitting for some power and playing on national TV didn't make them great, we'll someday look back at a lot of today's "great" courses and realize that they were really just well-hyped, visible, and fit the mold of what we thought was cool at the time. Coolness is more about style than substance, and minimalism is in right now. But someday that trend will shift, and when it does, we'll realize that some of these "great" courses of the last 20 years were really just stylish, while others will be properly canonized. You know, assuming that there isn't a giant outbreak of PED usage among architects that eventually taints this entire generation.
What would be the best PED for a GCA, anyways?