I believe the basic mistake that most of us make, probably including people like Tom MacWood and Ian Andrew, in analyzing a guy like OTM in the context of architecture and his contributions to it, is a failure to completely understand and appreciate just how different things really were back then in his age and era. We always seem to make the mistake, in both little and big ways, of assuming that things back then must have been sort of similar to our age or even the Golden Age of Golf architecture.
They weren't.
This kind of thing----this better appreciation of how different things really were once upon a time came home to me sort of full bore once when I was in the midst of a Rules change proposal and in frustration I was put in touch by the USGA with long time retired Joe Dey.
That man's understanding of the history of the Rules and the ramifications of the differences back then in apparently all things golf was unreal, in my opinion.
During our conversations, at one point, he stopped me and said;
"Tom Paul, I don't think you have much understanding of how very different things were back then, how completely rudimentary they really were back even in the middle of the 19th century. If you could step back from here and wash your mind of everything that intervened between back then and now you might not even recognize them."
As seems always true with golf course architecture, probably the best way to understand OTM's contribution to golf course architecture with courses other than the ones he actually worked for (full time), is to determine how much time he spent with them. If we find it was only a few days, we really don't need to know much more about his architectural contributions to them---eg they probably weren't remotely as much as we suspect.
As always, I feel, for whatever reason, Cornish and Whitten hit the nail on the head when they said about OTM that some of what he is blamed for was probably never done by him but by others years later or after he left some course after being there only a day or two.