Tom,
Your enthusiasm resurrecting Lido from the ashes of history is overwhelming.
If the Mona Lisa was destroyed by vandals - and we had enough information to hire the world's greatest fine art forger to perfectly recreate a facsimile of it, would the artistic validity of da Vinci's expression be erased because the original was gone?
Nope, it would proudly hang in the Louvre and still be studied by art students throughout the world.
Notre Dame Cathedral nearly burned to the ground, but every micron of what might be the world's most beautiful structure had been previously documented. Instead of rebuilding it, should France hire the modern hotshot architect du jour to build something different in its place?
Of course not! These are not only iconic works of art, but represent epochal achievements in the history of civilization.
Along the same line of reasoning, one can make the argument the original Lido was a seminal aesthetic, strategic and engineering creation in American golf history; a credible assertion can even be made (along with Timber Point) that Lido is the lost Atlantis of the game itself.
Like fabulous Shadow Creek, Lido was created from nothing . . . . one with unlimited casino money, the other only with pumped slurry and Raynor's imagination.
This is not like relocating non-descript London Bridge to completely out-of-context Lake Havasu - London Bridge is not a work of art like Tower Bridge . . . . which is why England did not replace it with an identical copy - even though it would have been a fairly simple matter.
Do you dig the fact you've been entrusted with the sacred duty of resurrecting and recreating a lost monument of American golf history? And not a vapid, Disney facsimile or Xeroxed pastiche - but a nuanced macro-scale creation, where nearly all the polish and touches will be yours. If it were me, I'd be scared to death, because you're being asked to remake the equivalent of a lost Kubrick film - with some key footage missing - without leaving an obvious imprint.
A man's gotta have brass stones to take that on, because you're chasing a ghost, not a mortal.You and I are one of the few who knew where and how this entire idea to build a new Lido got started - the fact you have been entrusted to bring it back to life strikes me as a peerless honor.
Doubtless, I'll be there on opening day . . . . .