RJ: Your story about the genesis of Sand Hills is nice, but not quite correct. Dick Youngscap was introduced to Coore and Crenshaw via Ron Whitten, who has been a longtime acquaintance of Dick's going back to when Ron wanted to work on the crew at Firethorn. Surely, having built Kapalua helped establish their credibility a little bit, but my guess is that Dick would still have liked Bill and Ben just as much and they would have been his choice regardless.
Dick felt some allegiance to Mr. Dye because of the success of Firethorn, and did speak to him about doing Sand Hills, but I believe he played it down because he really didn't think Pete was the best architect for that site. I have never heard that Pete had anything to say about Bill being chosen for the job, and I know all of the principals pretty well.
Regardless of the construction of Sand Hills, there were a few of us (Bill and Ben and myself at least) who had a different approach to design and construction, and were looking for a chance to apply it -- we had each done a handful of jobs by 1993. Sand Hills was the poster child which helped popularize the concept and convince other dreamers to act. We would still have found work without it, but it would have taken longer to get attention for it.
Mike Keiser was an investor in Sand Hills, so he shared that vision, too, but the success of Sand Hills emboldened him to move forward with his vision, so who knows if there would be a Bandon Dunes or not? And without Bandon Dunes, Greg Ramsay might still have had his idea, but none of the people who funded Barnbougle would have bought on, so I strongly suspect it wouldn't exist.
Ballyneal might be different ... they'd had their dream prior to Sand Hills, so they might have proceeded with it even without Sand Hills' success for encouragement. Whether they would have found me to design it might be a different story -- Jim O'Neal loved Pacific Dunes, but we have connections on several levels so we might have met anyway.